Stormy Weather

About a month ago I got a severe migraine the same day a thunder and lightning storm struck--after months of an unusually beautiful spring—sudden weather changes and especially storms usually trigger my migraines.  I expected to recover after a few days, as usual, once the weather had stabilized.  But the weather remained unstable, and the migraines were unrelenting.  I spent most of the first ten days in bed, not even feeling well enough to sit up and watch TV, which gave me plenty of time for reflecting on things.  I spent the first day or two thinking about time—I have an odd relationship with time, I think largely due to bipolar disorder, which can distort your sense of time, or distance you from it.   The reason I was preoccupied with time was that I was trying to recall how long I’d been feeling up and well, able to participate in a fair number of activities—wishing that I would return to that state after the migraines cleared up.  It was a bit more complex than that though, because in the preceding weeks I’d been forced to increasingly reduce my activities, and struggled to keep going.   As I could only achieve smaller and smaller tasks, and participate less in the outside world, my sense of time deteriorated.  When I’m struggling, remembering even my previous day can be difficult.  I’m more or less suspended in time.  I spent several hours working on remembering the previous week.  Tuesdays I have my Photoshop class, so I could remember that, and Thursdays I have my home group meeting, so I could remember that, and on Fridays I have gym class, so I could remember going there, and then going from there to meet with my sponsor to go over the second step.  The rest of the week remained in a fog. 

When you’re working, or going to school, taking vacations, filing income tax returns and so forth, there are markers for the progression of time.  Naturally, when you spend years on disability able to work little if at all, spending months or years in bed, time takes on a very different quality.  This is easy to understand since there are few if any external events to mark time.  Little if any interaction with the daily activities that structure time, give it a sense of progression.  Generally that doesn’t bother me, I’m used to it.  If I really need to know how long I’ve been living in this room, I can look for my lease, if I need to know when I last worked, I can look for my old pay slips, and so forth.  But there is something about time that is important to me.  When I’m in an up state, feeling well and vibrant, able to do things, I have a sense of time, there are good times and events to remember.  About six years ago or so, for about a year, I was feeling well enough to both teach part-time and do my photography regularly.  It was an exhilarating time; I wanted dearly to believe that it could last.   My psychiatrist at the time told me that it could last, as long as I stayed on my meds and stayed in therapy.  As much as I wanted to believe him, I knew from past experience that that would not be the case—I was living on borrowed time, so to speak.

Stuck in bed, one of the foremost things on my mind was how isolated I am here, that I don’t want to grow old in a city where I’m alone and isolated, and that I want to move as soon as I can to a place where I can build some friendships and have a small community around me.  Sure, Paris is filled with amazing opportunities and possibilities, but when you’re living in poverty so many of them are closed off to you.  I have just one friend here that I’ve had for years, Manu, who has a heart of gold, and is great fun to go out for a meal with, take a walk, or go to the movies, but he’s very quiet, certainly not the type of person I could talk to the way I’d like to be able to talk to with a girlfriend.  We see each other ever couple of months or so.  This last year I’ve become friends with Hélène, who’s painfully shy, so it’s been taking time, but we’ve been out to coffee a few times, and now have gotten into the habit of phoning each other regularly.  They are my only two friends here, other than my friends from the alcohol support program—I see them at the meetings and at coffee afterwards, and they’re there for you when you need support, but what I dearly want is a best friend here.

I still have good friends in the US even though I haven’t lived there for years, so I know it’s not just me.  There are a number of reasons it’s been so difficult for me to find friends here.  I went to the American University of Paris, which has a very international body of students, so after graduation my friends from school all moved to different countries.  As a photographer, I was working with different models daily, and they were much younger and had different interests, as well as being constantly on the road, so there weren’t any opportunities to make friends there.  My ex-husband was an extreme loner, so I couldn’t become friends with his friends.  And he went out of his way to keep me from seeing anyone that I knew.  As an English teacher, I had little or no contact with my colleagues, and of course even if you get on well with your students, there is a professional boundary that can’t be crossed.  And of course the years in bed with depression cut me off entirely from outside contact.  Friends that I did have would grow impatient and drop me.  Perhaps the greatest problem of all though is the French, they’re cold and distant, especially in Paris, and it can take years to become friends even if you have the opportunities to meet people.  I’ve heard that people form circles of friends at school, keep those friends over the years, and rarely admit new people into the circle.  Whatever the secret to making friends here is, I really don’t care any more.  I’ve certainly tried.  After two years of going to Kung Fu classes four to five times a week, I barely got a “good evening” out of the other women, and we shared a small locker room!  I didn’t have any more success meeting women in my dance class or book club, or any of the other activities I’ve tried. As much as I love Paris, and as hard as it will be to leave Paris, I am ready to go.  I’ve been thinking this through carefully for several years now; it’s time to move on.

Unfortunately I’m not in a position to just make up my mind and move.  Even though I’m a French citizen, I can’t collect French disability while living in Spain.  I could get my retirement there, but that’s not exactly around the corner.  The other obstacle is that I have a guarantor who’s in charge of my finances and administrative steps.  I had to accept having a guarantor after a combination of bad luck and poor judgment during a manic episode ran me badly into debt and nearly got me kicked out of the public housing where I live.  The guarantor pays all of my bills; I just have a withdrawal card so I can access a small weekly sum to cover groceries.  If I need anything else, I have to ask my guarantor, but at this point my budget is so tight, that there isn’t room for any purchases no matter how urgent.  I can’t use the withdrawal card outside of France, which makes travelling difficult.  I have the guarantor for a five year renewable period.  Which means I’m trapped here for four more years, and right now I feel that’s more than I feel can take.  I feel infuriated, trapped, depressed.  Four more years in this tiny room, where I can hardly get at my books where’s no room for crafts projects, no room for setting up easels to paint, where most of my stuff is in boxes because there’s no space to organize it in.  It’s literally like living in a storage unit.  I have to walk sideways to get past the boxes.  When I moved here I had to sell off or give away three quarters of my belongings, I’ve pared down to want I absolutely want to keep. 

Another subject I thought about while lying in bed, was the years I spent denying my disability or the extent of it.  I kept going back to work every time I was feeling better, although I was never well enough to work more than part-time, and gradually the number of hours I could work decreased till an eight hour workweek was a full load for me and even that ran me down.  I was on the waiting list for job retraining for six years, and was absolutely thrilled when I finally got called up for it.  Unrealistic projects danced in my mind.  A new start!  Before I could actually go through job retraining I had to go through an eight month period of evaluations and tests and meetings with psychiatrists.  At the end they concluded that I was too fragile to start job retraining.  I was both devastated and relieved, because during the evaluation period it had gradually dawned even on me that I wasn’t well enough to do what I wanted to do, that I never would be.

Lying in my one person bed, in this little tiny room, I can’t help but be reminded how small my life has become.  How many dreams, hopes and plans I’ve had to give up on.  My photography is the hardest part, I’ve always felt it is who I am, not just what I do.  Do I have to let go of that?  It’s inconceivable.  Spain is my one chance; there I could be near my brother Peter.  Apartments are cheaper or more spacious, there’s a beach, and people are more open and warmer.  Even if I could do little or no photography, I could write.  Writing doesn’t require money, just time, skill, and imagination.  I will be happy as long as I have at least one creative activity to occupy me.  I’d like to write fiction, but I have no idea if I could, much less what I’d write about.  I’m so depressed right now.  I’ve been staying in bed, most of the time for the past few days.

After two weeks, the migraines had subsided enough that I could sit up and watch TV.  The third week, the symptoms were weak enough that I could get out of my room a bit.  But I felt completely drained, I had no more motivation, I didn’t want to do anything.  “I feel like a sailor who’s been buffeted about in a long violent storm, then shipwrecked, trying to assess the extent of the injuries I’ve sustained.  Looking through the wreckage to see what I can fashion some sort of shelter from.  This time my world felt much smaller.  What is there left to reconstruct?  What is there left that I can build?

Somehow I’m going to have to find a way to make staying here longer work for me.  More years of being single, assuming my track record since leaving my ex husband over eleven years ago holds steady, more years of being isolated….  It’ll be okay as long as I can keep myself occupied, as long as I’m well enough to keep myself occupied.  I’ll begin studying Spanish when I return from vacation.  I’ll go back over my list of ideas for getting my photography going again, and see if any of them are viable.

The bleak reality is that I’ll be trapped in poverty for the rest of my life, and it will create great obstacles for my creative projects, and extremely limit what I can do with my photography.  Yes, I got into top international galleries, and my work was recognized by art critics, but even at the time I didn’t have enough money to complete the series I was showing, I couldn’t buy enough film, make prints, and get them matted and shipped.  Galleries don’t keep you if you’re not productive; they have to have artists that they can market.  Then there was the theft of all of the equipment I’d finally managed to buy after years of struggling, and no money to replace it with, and then periods of years where I was stuck in bed to depressed to get up and do much of anything.  And yet I’ve held onto my photography as if my life depended on it.  Somehow or another I need to complete the series, even if it never gets exhibited, I just need it to be complete.  And there are other series that I can see in my mind, that I’d start shooting right away, if I had the means to.  I can’t really think about this.  It’s not just that I don’t want to; I just don’t even know how to right now.