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I was unaware of how severe my mental illness was until last year. I had bad anxiety – I was aware of that – and transient depression, but I felt I could function just as well as someone without these conditions. I have been on the receiving end of someone’s severe mental illness, so I thought that I had a good idea what that would look like. My problems were more of a nuisance, persistent but not debilitating. I was medicated and that would keep me from falling into a worse state.

I was so confident in the mild nature of my anxiety that in 2015 I decided that I didn’t need medication anymore. This is not something unusual in mentally ill people. The side-effects become more bothersome than the condition. Plus, we are not feeling like we did before medication, so maybe it’s not a problem anymore. Maybe it was related to adolescence after all, and now that we’re adults, it’s not going to be as bad. There is a desire in all of us to feel like we are normal. Needing medication to stabilize our brain is not normal. Therefore, if we can get off the medication, we will be normal.

So, for four years or so, I was unmedicated. At the end of 2015, my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, we lost some dogs suddenly, and we discovered that part of our house was full of wood rot and needed to be rebuilt. The next year was consumed by long months of cancer treatment combined with construction done by one carpenter, which required my assistance. The following year my father-in-law died suddenly. I was anxious all the time and thought it was normal, somehow. I developed insomnia which meant I would get up every morning as early as 2:30 AM and walk for up to ten miles.

It was only after years of this that I determined that my anxiety was not, in fact, normal, and that my belief that I had left the need for medication behind was delusional. I went back on venlafaxine. It’s a horrible drug in several ways but it works for me. I was finally able to sleep like a normal person and did not feel on the edge of disaster all the time. Things got better for a while.  But, at some point in the last few years, I had to increase the dosage. The side effects became worse, but I couldn’t stay on the lower dose because it had stopped working like it had before. This was because my stress level had increased. A traumatic volunteer experience plus having a friend become psychotic made life feel much less stable.

Last year I had a breakdown. In a lot of ways, it was the culmination of decades of dealing with traumas by moving forward. Imagine being a runner and repeatedly falling and injuring yourself. Each time, instead of addressing the injury, you get up and start running again. This is how I lived. I believed that I always had to be the one to take care of things. I believed that there was no one who could help me, and I didn’t want help anyway. If I asked for help, surely I would be seen as weak or lazy or incapable. I am a fixer, and whatever it is, I will fix it. So last year, after a particularly stressful spring and early summer, I finally collapsed. As hard as I tried, I could no longer get up on my own. So, at the insistence of my wife, I went back to the doctor and asked for a dosage increase. I did not want to go up another 75mg, because I remember the last time I was at that level, in 2004, the side effects and the flat feeling it gave me were hard to take. My doctor also gave me the names of two mental health clinics so I could find a therapist.

I did not want to do talk therapy and did not believe it would be beneficial to me based on experience. I was dead wrong about that. The therapist I found listened to me and changed my thinking about my behavior. Things that I thought were normal turned out to not be so. I was given a battery of diagnostic tests. Each test resulted in me meeting the criteria for whichever condition it tested for. I have a cluster of symptoms and behaviors that could be autism, OCD, ADHD, or some combination of the three. I will try to describe my most debilitating and persistent symptom.

Have you ever had a thought enter your mind, unwanted? Intrusive thoughts are not that uncommon, however, the way I have intrusive thoughts is different. My mind likes to revisit past negative experiences and try to analyze them. This is not unusual on its own, but I obsess over them. I reanalyze past events, try to find things I missed, seek out hidden messages I did not get at the time, and play out “what if?” scenarios. If this was a one-time event, it would be fine; the trouble is that I become obsessed with it for months. Every day I will be bombarded with intrusive thoughts. Without conscious effort I will become enthralled in the little game my mind plays. I will replay visual and audio memories repeatedly to the point it resembles watching a short film on a loop, from the time I wake up until I go to bed. I don’t like uncertainty and there is nothing less certain than past events that feel unfinished. Not being able to attain certainty or solve the problem, I can never be satisfied. This leads to extreme anxiety and depression. Sometimes the only thing that can end it is if a present-day crisis presents itself. In that case, all my analytical abilities – and the desire uncertainty creates – shift to the new problem.

Therapy has made me realize this is disordered thinking, but it has also made me have to deal with the fact that I will never be able to get rid of it. Managing it is possible, but it will remain a life-long condition. Some days I am more accepting of this than others. Sometimes, at a low point, I will have suicidal thoughts intrude, never to the point of planning or considering it but present. I know that sounds bad, but it’s my problem-solving tendency throwing out ideas, not something I would ever consider. I think it’s just hard to accept that I am not “normal” and that I won’t ever be. On days when my thoughts feels stifling, I descend into a deep well of despair. On days like that, it is hard to function.

I feel better than I did a year ago thanks to therapy and medication. It has been incredibly difficult to get to this point. Therapy is very hard work when you are forced to address the things that scare you, the things that you have tried to suppress, the things that you ran from. I do not want to deal with these things, but at almost 42 years of age, I need to. Before they kill me. I am trying to be open about it, because feeling ashamed and hiding it is not helpful. I am trying to be compassionate towards myself. I can’t really allow myself to feel shame for something I can’t control, and you shouldn’t either if you also are suffering from mental illness. We are all imperfect creatures trying our best out here, after all.

“Please eat.”

The first time I said this was Saturday morning, as it had been 24 hours since he last ate. I was growing concerned by his lack of appetite and energy. Since he had come home he had mostly slept, and I assumed he was just tired from being in the hospital for three days. But now it was Sunday, and the extra appetite stimulant I picked up on Saturday afternoon had done nothing.

“Please eat.”

I woke up Sunday morning dreading the day to come because I could see it in my head. I knew this was it. He was not going to get better, and there was nothing left for us to do but the inevitable. I have done this more times than I can remember. The act itself becomes liberating compared to the agony you experience beforehand. There is a pall cast over everything until you are there, in the quiet room, waiting for the doctor to come in.

“Please eat.”

Waiting is so painful because you see them alive and know that they will soon be only memory. You see their little bodies breathe, you watch their little movements, you soak in their presence. All of this will be gone in minutes or hours. There is also the lingering hope – stupid, irrational hope – that they will make a miraculous recovery. I have never seen a miracle.

“Please eat.”

I had already been crying Sunday morning as I read stories from people who knew that their dog’s disease had won. The stories were filled with pain and also the deep love these people had for their pets. Reading their descriptions, though, told me we had reached the end. I got up and did my morning routine, I took the dogs out, I fed the other dogs their breakfasts. They were unaware that anything was amiss. Then I tried to feed Felix, knowing it was fruitless.

“Please eat.”

I was begging him. I felt my grip on things fail. Within seconds I was weeping and wailing, loudly and violently. I do not remember the last time I had a breakdown like this. I had spent my week from Tuesday until that moment lost in worry about this dog, and I had spent an insane sum of money to try to save him. I would have kept spending it, too. But when I got the secondary appetite stimulant on Saturday, the doctor let me know in so many ways that this was a last-ditch effort. The next step would be a feeding tube, she said, and at that point she would ask the client what they hoped to accomplish. I knew what she meant.

At the vet hospital, I held him while the techs got an IV catheter in him and checked his blood sugar and ketones. I saw the results instantly and knew. He was exactly where he was when he got there on Tuesday. The doctor offered the possibility of hospitalization at a specialty hospital and a feeding tube. We would not do that to him. Half an hour later I held him in my arms while he exhaled for the last time.

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Felix was something of an add-on dog. We originally were trying to pull another dog named Balto and learned he was bonded with Felix. So, being crazy, we were going to take both of them. But Balto was adopted, leaving Felix alone in a particularly bad shelter. And he ended up being very sick with a respiratory infection, which pushed the date of his arrival back. Instead of finding some sort of transport to send him up here, I decided to fly into Ontario so I could pick him up in San Bernardino. I would have to stay overnight.

I picked him up in the late morning and decided, on a whim, to drive into the mountains. I had a little bed and a stuffed elephant for him, and we drove up through Rim of the World and Crestline and turned around at Lake Arrowhead while listening to Buffalo Springfield. In Crestline we share a hamburger and fries. He was a perfect little companion. To kill time before checking into the hotel in Ontario, we drove all the way to Pomona and back. He was perfectly happy laying in his bed and occasionally sleeping. At the hotel I fretted about leaving him alone while I went to get dinner. But when I got back to the room, he was curled up sleeping on the couch.

That was Felix in a nutshell. He was perfectly fine just hanging out and nothing seemed to bother him. A lot of chihuahua mixes are decidedly not chill, but he was just an easygoing, pleasant little dog. He loved people and people loved him. He loved life and was never happier than when he was sleeping in the sun. It was almost like he knew he had gotten a reprieve and was committed to enjoying his time on earth.

I thought we would have more time with him. It seems unfair that we knew him for less than six years. But you never know with shelter dogs if they are older than you think or younger, so time is not something guaranteed. When he passed, it occurred to us that he might have been older. But it doesn’t much matter. He was taken from us and now we are deprived of his presence in our lives, and we are poorer for it. I think I will resolve to try to live my life like he would, taking things as they come and not letting the stress of the world get to me. In that way, his spirit can live on.