I was still covered under my mother’s insurance plan but she was paying for my therapy out of pocket and my medications weren’t covered at all. They literally ran into the thousands each month. I came back to my mother’s home with a serious debt load from my manic shopping spree and my mother was not wealthy. The therapy itself was putting us over the edge. She had to borrow money from family to keep us afloat and arrangements had to be made quickly to pay for medication.
I went to the state human services building to see a social worker and ask if I qualified for Medicaid or any other program that would cover my medication. There was something for people in my situation. It gave me medication insurance and food stamps.
That first time we went to the grocery store with food stamps and presented them to the clerk, it was humiliating. She looked at us, then started pawing through our groceries. I’m sure there are things you can’t buy with food stamps and that’s what she was looking for but the experience was not good. It’s not good for anyone, but the food stamps themselves are a lifesaver when you’re in financial straits.
I was scraping the bottom of my mental barrel during this two year period. We tried just about every medication in the book. I was horribly depressed. I had trouble sleeping at night, getting out of bed in the morning, and living the moments in between. I wasn’t sure I would ever come out of it. I was indeed feeling hopeless much of the time. I’m sure my mother was terrified. Without my family I would have been homeless during this period and I’m not sure what would have happened to me.
I’ve always been afraid I would enter another period of near-incapacitation. It’s an incredibly frightening thing to have happen to you: the inability to support yourself, emotionally or financially. I wasn’t just a wreck, I was in a state of complete melt-down for what felt like an endless period of time. It was enough to change me as a human being: to change what I fundamentally believe to be true about myself, how I define myself in my own head.
I worked, but it was hard going. When I look at my taxes I realize I worked 9 jobs in two years. I wasn’t fired from anything, but there was one job I left after one shift. Others I left after a few months. All part time. Some days I would be so anxious I would stand behind the video store counter or wherever it was and just tremble through an entire shift, going out to my car on break to cry from the stress.
And along with the medication, and the depression, came weight gain. In the first year out of college I gained one hundred pounds.
I was hospitalized eleven more times in those two years.
Plum Librarian LLC 