All Mixed Up

I’ve been cycling.  As a matter of fact, I’m still on the downswing.  It started with hypomania that I didn’t even recognise.  My therapist pointed it out to me.  This went on for roughly two weeks (which is why I haven’t posted).  My thoughts raced madly, and I wanted everyone to shut it so I could keep talking.  *Nothing* moved fast enough.

From there, the mixed state set in.  The latest DSM did away with mixed episodes.  The disorder, on the other hand, did not.  This is the dangerous stage for me.  All the despair and suicidal ideation of depression with all the energy of mania.  I had racing dark thoughts.  I didn’t want to talk anymore because I didn’t want anyone to get in my head.  My paranoia shot up.  *Everything* was dangerous.

Now I’ve fallen in to a light depression.  It’s inconvenient and uncomfortable, but I feel I can cope with it safely.  If not, I’ll definitely phone up my therapist.  This completes my cycle, though. A couple of weeks of mania, followed by a week or so mixed, followed by sometimes months of depression.  Here’s hoping this stage passes as quickly and as easily as possible.

What Might Have Been

My thoughts have been going down that road all weekend, and it’s dangerous.  I look back on certain situations in my past and wonder how they might have turned out if x had or hadn’t happened.  This is futile at best and dangerous at worst.  A decade ago, something happened in my life that lost me quite a few friends.  It’s been an entire bloody decade, and the thought of it still floors me.  I felt I had everything going for me.  Then, one person and one event tore it all down.  The logical part of me realises that means it simply wasn’t meant to be.  The emotional part of me wants to stamp my feet and demand the chances back again.

This has left me quite depressed.  I’m not suicidal, but I keep having these fleeting thoughts like ‘what would happen if I just slit my wrists.’  Maybe I just want a visible indication of how I feel whilst the smile sits on my face.  I wish I could somehow communicate to someone exactly how miserable I feel, but trauma dictates that I keep smiling and avoid bothering people.  Therapy this week.  Hopefully, I’ll drop the facade there and actually process this stuff.  In the meantime, I shall sit here typing away and trying to stay in the present.  The past is just so hard to resist.

Crashing Down

I’ve been in a bipolar depressive episode for five weeks with about two days’ reprieve.  Things are black.  The sun doesn’t even look bright.  I’m so tired of feeling like this.  My doctor is trying me on an anti-depressant with the thought that the potential for a manic episode is not worth letting the depressive episode carry on like this.  In the meantime, *everything* is falling apart.  I got in trouble at work, gained weight I’d lost, and just generally stopped caring enough to take care of myself.

This lands me where I am today.  I feel disgusting inside and out.  My disordered eating patterns are back.  The self-injurious behaviour is back.  I just generally don’t care what happens to my body right now.  My mind is too far from settled to give it thought.

I stay around for those I love and those who love me back.  I stay for my cats who are my little furry children.  I stay for my family-of-choice who I couldn’t hurt the way being a survivor of suicide does.  I’m just tired of staying right now.

Here

I came home unexpectedly today.  A few nights ago, I woke up unexpectedly in hospital after having taken what I thought was a fatal overdose.  The combination of a lengthy depressive episode and a bad living situation that I can’t escape got to be too much for me, and I attempted to end my life.  Yet now I’m here, typing a blog post I never thought I’d write on a day I never thought I’d see.

Even though the attempt didn’t work, I hurt a great deal of people.  Most of all, I hurt my FOC.  These are the people who taught me family and who expect me to be there for them.  I let them down, and I’ll have to live with that.  How do you apologise enough?  How do you win back the trust of those who never deserved to be put in this situation?  How do you learn to live with the guilt?  I’m wrestling with these questions now.  Nothing I can do will make up for what I put people through, but I’ll do my best.

There’s also therapy– loads of it.  I’m having daily sessions, at least by phone, and working hard at setting things right.  It will take a while; I’m not completely happy to be here yet.  I can, however, say that I’m not a danger to myself.  My therapist told me to hold on to the feeling of pain brought on by putting my FOC through this, and that is a great motivator for staying alive.  In the past, it’s always been enough to see me through.  This time, however, my current situation won out.  My FOC do *not* deserve this.

I’m not sure how to move forward from here.  Slowly, of course, but the path is unclear.  I’ve given my word to two of the most important people in my FOC for the first time, and I keep my word.  Suicide is no longer an option.  In a strange sense, that leaves me feeling helpless.  What can I do if things get to be too much again? That question might well go unanswered for a bit.  Much therapy yet to come.

So I’m here.  And I’m working on it.  For now, that’s all I can do.

Feeling Disconnected

Everything feels unreal to me at the moment.  The holiday season is so bittersweet, and whilst I’ve had a few triumphs this year, I still feel overwhelmed by it all.  I’m really trying this year, but I truly do not feel connected to a single person, pet, deity, or object.  I feel like I’ve settled in to nothingness.  On the outside, things look fine.  I function as I always have, stand in for friends when they need me, and take care of all the practical things that make a life.  Inside, though, I feel a sense of blackness and nonexistence that’s so deep it’s almost an ache.  Whatever this is, I just hope it passes soon.

Crawling Out

I spent most of September in the haze of mania and depression, sometimes mixing the two.  In fact, a great deal of the month is a blur.  What stands out clearly is the fear, darkness, and complete overwhelm that followed me through rapid cycling and a meds change.  Now, thankfully, I’m pulling out.  I still feel somewhat timid and afraid, worried that the next step will take me back down *that* path.  I’m also very easily triggered right now and trying to be careful in those terms.  It’s hard when the world is filled with such bad news, though.  I’m grasping at straws, albeit with more ease, at the moment and crawling out one more time.  Hopefully, that means I’ll blog with more regularity again.  Thanks to my devoted readers who keep coming back, even when there’s very little to see.

That Bipolar Thing

Lately, bipolar disorder is reminding me that it has, in fact, got a place in the chemistry of my mind.  I work very carefully to manage the disorder.  I take my meds correctly (with a few exceptions that we all seem to have), I keep appointments with my psychiatrist and therapist, and I am diligent about monitoring my symptoms.  Lately, however, I’ve been riding through a chaotic storm of bipolar swings.

It started with irritability and restlessness that I didn’t put together as precursors.  Last weekend, things started getting particularly interesting.  The world stopped moving at the right pace; it was far too slow.  Things started magnifying to the point that the entire world and everything in my life was a trigger.  I just wanted to cover my head and pretend that nothing other than soft, plain dark colours existed.  Evil voices kept telling me of horrible things I had done or would do, none of which were true.  Things continued to decline from there, and by Thursday, I wanted to dissect the veins in my forearm to get out the shiny things in my blood that I knew would protect me.

Throughout this, I missed work which means financial problems abound.  It’s left me feeling selfish, lazy, and more than a touch mad.  Things are still big and mean and scary, in that the slightest thought of negativity gets magnified to the point that it seems a personal crisis.  I’m not willing to spend a cent, simply because I feel undeserving of anything because of missing work.  I don’t have the energy, really, to do anything anyway.  I feel like staring in to space for the next few decades just to avoid anything that might send my mind back down the path of horrible scenarios and hallucinations.

Things have fallen apart, due completely to bipolar disorder this time.  I feel incapable of do anything productive, as I feel like a complete waste of space and oxygen.  My mind, when it does become lucid, takes so much time to process information.  I fluctuate quickly between the depths of despair and the terror of psychosis.  *Everything* is a trigger these days.  Ironically, I have no idea of what actually triggered the bipolar symptoms, but I don’t remember purchasing a ticket for this particular ride.

Descending in to Madness

Things are bad.  Very bad indeed.  I’m having miserable luck which would almost be tolerable if I were not also having mood issues and psychosis.  The food problems returned a few weeks ago, and they’ve hung about to some extent.  They’re better, in that I’m not doing the binge/purge thing on a daily basis, but they’re still in place.  I have a feeling they might be in place for a while.  This feels like it did when I was first diagnosed at aged 19.  I know, logically, that this is very damaging to mind and body, but I can’t quite fend off the behaviour.  Which probably led to the next bit.

The weekend before last, I started getting extremely paranoid.  This is never a good sign.  By that Saturday night, I was incredibly stressed.  By that Sunday, I was suicidal.  Staying alive was quite honestly a fight.  I was awake most of that night debating whether to stay alive and fighting with a very strong urge to swallow every pill in my side table.  The thought was ‘what if my only hope is just to hope it doesn’t get worse.  The SRA component means it never will get better.’  I still feel like that, but I’m trying to ignore it.  My mind flirts with suicide, but I don’t feel a critical danger.  Last week I set the plan and wrote the letters.  This week, I’m just overwhelmed and aware that I could very easily slip back in to that suicidal mindset.

This weekend, the psychosis started.  It started whilst I was driving, and I thought I might have an accident.  A dead woman with solid white eyes and wet, stringy black hair leaned between my best friend and I.  Eventually, her eyes turned dark, and worms started crawling out of her mouth.  I told this to my best friend and said I hoped she didn’t stay once he left.  Next I knew, the hallucination gave me a sardonic smile and nodded her head yes.  On my one hour drive home, I could hear the voice of the dead woman sitting in the car behind me.  Only when I phoned a dear friend did the voice stop.  I don’t typically hold phone conversations whilst driving, but that night it was a choice between trying to drive whilst minding an hallucination or talking with a friend to drown out the voice and (partially) the image.

I went home briefly, but the hallucinations continued.  Once again, the man who calls the dead people stood in my room and told me he would bring them if I didn’t give a blood sacrifice.  Once again, I cut my arm until the blood flowed down it.  Finally, I managed to escape and walked the half block or so to my friend’s house and stayed with her, watching carefully for the man and dead people because I knew they’d be angry with me for hiding.  The psychosis has passed.  The depression is still set firmly, interrupted only by hypo-manic symptoms and hypervigilance.  I have therapy on Thursday and am slightly afraid she’ll put me in a crisis unit until things calm.  The repercussions of that, given my SRA background, could be severe.   I just want to get help, though.  I’m at my final tether now.

Add to that ‘normal’ problems.  A cutback at work that will, once put in to effect, cause me to make less than I need to even pay my bills.  A crap review makes me think they might fire me soon anyway.  And, to be completely honest, I’ve missed a fair bit of work lately because the depression left me too tired to even get out of bed early in the week.  Financially, I have no idea what I’m going to do.  The Americans refer to ‘bleeding a turnip’ as the term for trying to get money from a person who has none to give.  I’m in that position right now.

So this is me: overwhelmed by even the smallest problem, on the verge of suicidal, depressed, psychotic, and hypo-manic all at once.  No idea of the path from here.

Reminders

I have the choice of being constantly active and happy or introspectively passive and sad.  Or I can go mad by ricocheting in between. ~ Sylvia Plath

 

Every now and then my wonky brain reminds me that, in spite of the myriad of other possibilities, I do have bipolar disorder.  This would be one of those times.  I feel like I’ve been sliding on a helter skelter since Saturday night.  Saturday was the top of the spiral.  My best friend and I had an *amazing* day.  Over the course of that day, I felt the somewhat manic pace of my brain bumbling about but decided it was probably just excitement.  By the end of the evening, however, my thoughts were coming so rapidly that I had to focus on small things like drawing just to be able to think at all.

Sunday started similarly.  About midday, however, the crash began.  It was one of those bumpy descents that threatened to even out, only to fall lower the next round.  By Sunday night, I was so depressed that texting my best friend seemed to take too much energy.  And I don’t miss a minute of texting him.  Not to be outdone, however, Monday brought back the helter skelter. In the bipolar vernacular, there is a debated pattern called ultradian cycling.  This is when a person cycles between euphoric highs and deep depressions over a 24-hour period.  Mental health professionals debate the existence of this pattern.  They would not debate it if they bloody felt it.

Mind you, things have settled back in to a lovely depression today.  The type that makes the sun seem darker somehow and any chance of happiness is destroyed by whatever thought it happens to bring.  Couple that with thoughts that still won’t stop racing and a variety of psychotic symptoms, and you get a semi-functional unfocused me who takes well over an hour to write a simple blog post.  I suppose that’s still loads better than not functioning at all.  Optimism at its finest (and most sarcastic).

Reminders

My holiday depression has reared its ugly head, and it is bringing a renewed problem with cutting.  This is something I’ve had more of a problem with this year than in a while.  Right now, it’s particularly bad.  The cuts are deeper than typical, as I’ve had trouble actually *feeling* the blade, even when I could hear it cut through.  It’s a focus– something to stop my mind spinning.  Cuts are deepened, scars are re-opened, and proof of my life is there on my arms.

My feelings vacillate between absolute numbness and complete overwhelm.  It’s chaotic.  SI breaks the numbness through the pain and blood.  In the day, the pain of bending my arm and the feeling of the cuts rubbing on my sleeves gives me a focus other than what’s going on around me.  When things get far too overwhelming, I can just concentrate on the pain, the one constant in my life right now.