Columns – The Daily Opinion

Moving On

My sister is currently in the process of moving house.

It never occurred to me that I would find this a particularly momentous occasion, not for myself at least. She has been trying to move for over a year now, since she fell pregnant and it became clear they didn’t have enough space in the house in which they currently live. I have however found myself considering a number of things in light of their move, specifically how much my relationship with my sister has changed since she first moved into her current house, and how much better I have become at dealing with potentially dangerous triggers in my life.

I was not invited to my sister’s current house until many years after she had first moved in. The first time she invited me, I mentioned that I’d never been before and she was shocked, and said that couldn’t possibly be right, but it was. The truth of the matter was that neither of us liked to acknowledge the fact that, until recently, we were not close.

This was not the case when I was very young, but as I remember it (she may have a different recollection) there reached a point when I was about five or six when she no longer seemed to understand me. I can’t speak for her, but from my perspective, it seemed she found me strange, embarrassing, and generally an annoyance. It was not often she spent time with me, and when she did it was strained. I usually upset her—not on purpose, but simply by default. I was going through an awful lot she was totally unaware of and I was, from a young age, angry the majority of the time. As a result, she kept me at a distance, from herself, her friends, and her boyfriend (now husband) when he came along. Looking back, I can understand why. My moods were unpredictable, usually quite unpleasant and, at the time, totally inexplicable to my family, who had no idea I was bipolar, and no idea what else was going one. I was conditioned to keep bad things a secret from a young age. Consequently, I never told anyone when something bad happened.

This was a pattern that wasn’t broken until after my diagnosis in 2010. It was only then, at the age of nearly twenty five, that I was finally told I had bipolar, and finally began to unravel the mess that was my life. It was another eighteen months before I managed to extricate myself from a very bad situation, move home to my mother—another member of my family with whom I had previously had a very strained relationship—and get on the MEDs that would finally give me a little relief from the madness. It wasn’t a quick fix, it has taken a lot of time and effort and I still suffer the effects of my mood swings, but I am learning how to deal with them.

I am also pleased to say that I have learned how to be a better sister.

That said, one of my greatest regrets is that I was not a bridesmaid at my sister’s wedding. This was not, I hasten to add, because she didn’t ask me to be one. She did, and I agreed, very excitedly at first, until I let myself think about the prospect of standing up in front of all those people, in a posh dress, beside all of my sister’s friends. This, again, may only be my perspective, but I have always found the majority of my sister’s friends to view me in a similar manner to my sister—strange, rude, and to be avoided. On occasion, they have been downright horrible to me, but then again I imagine they have been on the receiving end of my own rudeness at times also. If she asked me again now, I might perhaps be able to manage it, but at the time I was only recently diagnosed, I was in the midst of a very bad bout of depression, and I could not summon the confidence to stand—all eighteen stone of me—next to several size 8 princesses and my equally regal and skinny sister.

I will never forget the feeling of having totally let her, and myself down that day.

The real change in our relationship, for me at least, came when she fell pregnant. I was petrified at first that this would trigger me, and I wasn’t alone. My mother, my psychiatrist, my GP, and my friends, were all on high alert for me to start slipping, but I surprised myself—and them—by coming out of my shell somewhat and stepping up to the plate. For the majority of her pregnancy, my sister suffered from severe pelvic girdle. I was studying for my PhD full time at that stage, and so my time was reasonably flexible and I spent a lot of time helping out and looking after her. Indeed, for the last three months of her pregnancy she was in a wheelchair, and needed a lot of help, a situation which continued for some time after the birth of my niece, as my sister slowly recovered.

The notion of there being anything at all wrong with her was, I feel, so utterly terrifying for me that it overrode my own shit enough that I could actually deal with the pregnancy and subsequent birth of my niece with minimal trauma. The reason everyone was so worried was, of course, due to a miscarriage I suffered when I was eighteen. That event was, perhaps, the worst thing that has ever happened to me—including the fire—as it had such a detrimental effect on my mental health. It scarred me in a way I’ve never been able to fully explain or understand, and it is a scar that is easily reopened. My worst triggers are the ones that remind me of my miscarriage.

And so it was a point of pride that I was able to look after my sister while she was pregnant, and put her needs before my own. It is a point of pride that I have fallen so in love with my niece, that I do not look at her and see my own child, the child I never knew, which is something that usually happens when I encounter small children—even my goddaughter and her younger sister were dangerous for me to be around when they were young, and consequently I didn’t see them regularly until they were older, and I could disassociate them from babies. This, again, is something I will always regret, having missed out on them when they were that age despite loving them both almost as much as my niece.

I have been thinking a lot about this over the last week, as my sister prepares to leave the house she wouldn’t let me anywhere near for years, and move to a new one, a fresh start for her family, and a fresh start for my cognitive associations, because I now will not have to be reminded, whenever I visit her, of the fact that she kept me away for so long. The fact that I will always be welcome at their new home is, again, a point of pride for me, and I am delighted to say that (coincidently) my niece also decided that yesterday was the day she would take her first steps.

We are, all, moving on.

There have been other stresses over the last few weeks, things that have, one by one, driven my mood down. The worst of these was the fact that my grandfather had a bit of a health scare, and had to go into hospital for a minor procedure. I am beyond relieved to be able to report that he is fine, and now home, but I found it to be an incredibly stressful experience. The memory of my Nanny’s long, painful illness and subsequent passing is still too raw, still too recent, and fear for what might happen to him has kept me wide awake most nights for the last fortnight, leaving me exhausted.

I am, also, ashamed to say that I did not visit him in hospital.

I tried. Plans were made for me to visit with my brother and his girlfriend when they were going, so I did not have to face it alone. These were scuppered when we thought he was being discharged early, and I had to rush over to his flat and get everything clean and ready for him to get back. He was not, in the end, let out that day, and the following morning I braced myself for going alone, or at least with my mother later that day.

I couldn’t face it.

I’m not sure what upsets me most about this, the fact that I let down my granddad by not going to visit when he needed, and expected me to be there, or the fact that the reason for my absence was not fear of seeing him in hospital, or worry over his health, but sheer terror over stepping foot in the building.

He was in Macclesfield hospital.

In a couple of months the ten year anniversary of my miscarriage is going to smack me between the teeth. I am preparing for the possibility it will floor me, although I am vaguely hopeful that I will manage it better than I’m expecting. I have managed my sister’s pregnancy, I’ve been active in looking after my niece and see her often. Surely, I tell myself, I can cope with a date.

It’s meaningless.

So I tell myself.

Yet when faced with the prospect of returning to the very place where, almost ten years ago, I was ferried in an ambulance while losing a child I was, at that point, unaware I was even carrying, I fell apart. Would I have managed it, had I been able to go that day with my brother? I have no idea. I like to think I would have. I like to think that I have moved on enough to have been able to cope with that, albeit with the support of someone else. I have however learned that one should not be so stubborn as to refuse the aid of others if it’s what you need to get you through the day.

That, for me, is a monumental achievement. I have always been a lone wolf, keeping my problems to myself, and dealing with them (or more often utterly failing to cope with them) alone.

So I find myself thinking, in the midst of my complete exhaustion, that even though I failed to visit, I did not fail entirely, for I was able to acknowledge the fact that I wanted to go, but needed help to manage it. I was able to ask for that help. And had circumstances not prevented it from happening I like to think I would have succeeded in making that visit, and not completely fallen apart as a result.

I am, it would seem, also moving on.

I’m just doing it a lot slower than most.

Smiling For No Reason

It’s a long time since I’ve been happy.

In the last year or so I’ve managed glimpses of happiness, moments in time where something (usually my niece) gave me a momentary feeling of happiness, even an hour or two. I’ve had days when I’ve not felt as bad as usual, and over the summer my mood was markedly improved. I did not have to be high to feel okay, I managed it on my own sometimes.

As I’ve slowly started putting my life back together after the events of recent years, I’ve found happiness and hope to be the two things most difficult to hold onto. They are fleeting, flighty creatures, always dancing away from you, always just out of reach. Often as not by the time you realise you are feeling them the moment has passed, they are gone, and you are left fumbling after them, whimpering pathetically.

Hope, I have found, is something that has come back to me with time. It is still not a thing I can hold onto for long, but it is certainly something I am managing to feel more and more often, and for longer and longer stretches.

Happiness on the other hand, is considerably more elusive. I have noticed that it is easy to feel happy when something very GOOD is happening. When I see my niece I feel happy, even when I’m depressed I feel better, because she is a bright spot in my world that simply can’t be dimmed. She is a GOOD thing that makes me feel happy. When she is not around however, I find it difficult to replicate the feeling I have when I’m with her. Thinking about her can make me smile, but it doesn’t necessarily make me happy.

Today I found myself doing something I haven’t done in a VERY long time. I was smiling for no reason. Nothing particularly earth shattering happened today, I had a pleasant time at my writing group, but there’s nothing unusual there, they’re a wonderful bunch of people. I’m almost always happy when I’m with them. They regularly make me smile. Usually though, I begin the long drive home and that feeling ebbs. It runs away from me, and try as I might to hold onto it, I fail. It is not enough that there are things in my life that can make me happy, they are too infrequent, to transitory, to allow me to build up any kind of permanent feelings of pleasure, of cheerfulness, of simple contentment.

Today was different. Today, on the drive home, even after I got home, even now as I sit typing this, I find I am smiling for no reason.

Today I am happy.

And that gives me hope.

Crime and Punishment

This week I watched helplessly as my niece nearly choked to death in my arms, and my sister nearly did the same on the floor.

I’ve had one client make a string of the most unreasonable demands, all of which I have met without complaint and in a timely fashion, despite feeling like death myself.

I have had another client try to charge me three times the amount they were paying me, because they had changed the due date of the piece and failed to inform me they needed it sooner.

I’ve had a permanent migraine.

And, perhaps worst out of all of these things, I did something I didn’t think I’d be having to do for several years to come yet: buried my first friend. By first, I mean it’s the first time I’ve had a friend die. I’ve had relatives die, mostly due to age or terminal illness, but I have never before lost a friend.

Lindsey’s death had already left me reeling. The thought of something happening to my niece left me in a state of blind panic. Add to that physical illness and a gruelling work load and I think I did pretty well just to survive the week. I think anyone would have done well to survive that week, whether they were bipolar or not, whether they were in the midst of a depressive cycle or not. These are difficult things to deal with. Dealing with all of them at once only heightens the difficulty. When you are already teetering on a knife edge, as I have been doing for a while now, any one of these things is enough to send you under.

And it did.

By Friday I felt like a walking corpse. I don’t feel much better today, but I have at least regained the power of thought, something which eluded me on Friday. In hindsight, given how I was feeling, I should not have been trying to work. Despite the amount I had to do, I should have simply said to myself ‘take the day, have a rest, and get your head together’. Me being me, I did not say this, because as often as not taking a day off when feeling like this makes me a lot worse in the long run. So I kept working.

Big mistake.

I said something on Friday which, in hindsight, was foolish, and I can understand why the person I said it to got so I annoyed about it. I realise that it was a stupid thing to say, especially to a client, and that I never should have said it. Hindsight, however, is a remarkable thing. At the time I didn’t see this. At the time I was simply trying to get through the day without falling apart, and I wasn’t thinking ahead enough to have considered that these words could be taken very badly. His reaction shocked me, for while I can understand that what I said may have annoyed him, I found his response as unprofessional as he had found my comment. Turn around is fair play and all that, but it was not only unprofessional, it was unkind.

There is a certain amount I can take, especially when I know I’ve done something or said something out of place. If someone feels the needs to pull me up on it, to tell me it’s out of line, then fine, I’m aware of the fact that I’m not always the best at communicating with people. I also find it helpful when people actually articulate to me what I’ve done wrong, so I can be more mindful in the future. Most bipolar bears will tell you they have trouble communicating, especially when they are at the extreme of one mood or another.

I do not, however, feel this is an excuse. For example, I didn’t say to my client ‘I’m sorry I said that, but I’m bipolar and quite ill at the moment’. The reason for this is very simple: it’s not professional.

Bringing my bipolar into a business relationship is something I simply do not do unless it is absolutely necessary. A lot of my clients are aware of the fact I have bipolar, but only because they have seen or heard of my column, not because I’ve told them. I’ve even discussed it with a few of them, but almost always because they have brought it up, or brought up a related topic. It isn’t easy trying to regulate your mood when you have a mood disorder, yet somehow I now manage to do so—the majority of the time—well enough that I can continue to function in the professional world. This often requires me to bite my tongue and let the other guy ‘win’ the argument, not because I think they’re necessarily right, but because I know my reaction to the whole situation has been marred by my condition. I’ve usually over reacted, and if I have over reacted, that usually means there should never have been a disagreement in the first place and I should be the one to end it, no matter how crappy that leaves me feeling.

I am the first to admit I have not been at my best this last week. I can apologise for that as much as I like, but at the end of the day it wasn’t my fault. Circumstances have left me mentally and physically exhausted, and when you’re in such a state, you do make mistakes. You forget to keep your business head on every second of the day. You say the wrong thing. It’s unintentional, but it happens.

I didn’t say anything horrendous this week. It was simply an unfortunate turn of phrase which the client took the wrong way. I meant it literally, however they took offense. I can understand why they took offense, and I would probably have been equally offended had our positions been reversed. Once I realised why they were annoyed, I completely understood, I apologised. I did not however say the one thing that was actually true: ‘I would never have said that if I wasn’t bipolar’. By which I mean, were it not for my current mood state, I wouldn’t have said something so easily misinterpreted, something that does, I have to say, come across as being patronising and very annoying. I can well understand why he was so irritated with me. What I can’t understand is what he did next.

He went on his business page on Facebook – his BUSINESS page, I add, not his private page where he talks to all his friends – and repeated what I’d said. Now, he didn’t name me, and for that I am grateful, but he did insight an entire thread on Facebook consisting of numerous people—some of whom I know—to discuss this thing I had said by mistake, because I’ve been having one of the worst weeks imaginable. Naturally they all agreed with him: it was a terrible thing to say, he should tell me to ‘piss off’, he should never work with me again, I was ‘clearly inarticulate’, etc. etc. He said he’d ‘dealt’ with the issue, which is true he did. He got very annoyed with me for a while and said some rather angry things, sent me a link to a book about better communication, and then told me to forget about it.

He then sent me a link to this thread on Facebook.

Right up until that point, I could deal with his reaction. I’d said something that had annoyed him and he’s reacted accordingly. Granted, in the world of professionalism you shouldn’t do this, even when someone really pisses you off, you should find a way to discuss it calmly, however I myself am not always capable of doing this and I know there are very few people who could say they can manage this 100% of time. Fair enough. I’d said a stupid thing because of my bad week and terrible mood, he’d reacted badly to it because what I’d said had put him in an equally bad mood. He came back to me a while later with the link to this book and told me to forget it. Again, fair enough. As I said, I know I have issues with communication. I’m fine when I’m writing, but conversations are not my strong point. So, although I found it a little patronising, I felt it was justified. And then came the link to the thread.

I didn’t read it on Friday, I’d totally had it by then and spent the rest of the day in bed, mostly crying. I didn’t look at it yesterday as I didn’t want a reminder of that conversation as I was quite sure it would have me, once more, in tears. I looked at it today, and it wasn’t what I expected. I assumed when he sent it that it was a blog post he’d written in the past about effective communication—it’s the sort of thing he’d write about. I was so shocked when I saw this Facebook thread that I have now completely re-evaluated my opinion of him, not only as a person, but also as a professional. There was nothing professional about that thread. It was venting, pure and simple, he had been annoyed by something and had needed to vent, had needed others to justify his annoyance and tell him he was right, and that’s all fine, everyone needs that sometimes, however that is what your FRIENDS are for, not your business acquaintances. This conversation should have taken place on his personal page, not his business page, and he sure as shit should not have made me privy to it.

Why?

Because it was cruel. The things written on this thread were aimed directly at me and they were very unkind. I can forgive the people who said them, because they don’t (for the most part) know me, and even the ones who do didn’t know he was talking about me.

I wonder when he sent that link, in the midst of his annoyance, his anger, his outrage at what I’d said, if he stopped to think just how upsetting it would be for me to read that thread. If it occurred to him that it was completely unprofessional of him to have had that kind of conversation on his business page, and then direct me right to it. And I find myself realising something quite profound. Those of us who suffer through the horrors of conditions like bipolar, and actively monitor our condition through MEDs, therapy etc, are in general far better at dealing with situations like this than the average Joe. Our conditions make our moods unpredictable, unbearable, and at times destructive, yet we are usually able to recognise reasonably quickly when we have said or done something out of place.

In this case, I apologised the instant I realised I’d said something wrong. With most people I know, that is enough for them—yes they’re annoyed, but once they realise you didn’t intend something the way it was taken, they accept the apology, they calm down. They get their own mood under control. They may later bitch about it to their friends, but that’s okay, that’s what friends are there for, and they’re perfectly entitled to do that. What astonished me in this instance was the fact he made the whole thing so public. I felt like I’d had a good hard flogging, in the town square, while shackled by the neck and wrists in the stocks, with the locals through rotting vegetables at me.

If I reacted like he did, people would tell me to calm down, to do some deep breathing. They’d ask if I was feeling okay, how was my mood, was I depressed. They might even ask if I’d taken my MEDs properly. They would—perhaps naturally—assume that the over reaction was the result of my bipolar. When a person doesn’t have a condition like bipolar however, I wonder what people make of them acting in this manner. I personally found it extremely cruel. I’m not ashamed to say it made me cry again, and yes, that could be part of my current state of mind, but I think a lot of people seeing a thread like that, so filled with venom, written all about them, would have felt similarly upset.

Were this person simply a friend, I would have told them they had upset me. Since they are a client, I feel I am obliged to rise above it, to take it on the chin and never mention it again. That is the professional thing to do in this situation. And yet I ask myself, why is it that I must be professional, when he was not? Why is it that the person here who was able to see they had accidentally said something upsetting and apologise for it, sincerely, was then made to feel like utter crap, while the other party, who was clearly also in an equally bad mood and quite purposefully did something upsetting, is validated by his peers.

The irony of the entire situation is, of course, what I said to him in the first place: No offense.

Why did I say that? Because I was about to say something which I realised could be taken badly, and I wanted him to know that wasn’t my intent. I was trying to avoid offending him.

He was, of course, instantly offended.

A Painful Truth…

This week I must report both sad news, and happy news. I debated making two posts of this and keeping them separate, yet the two subjects collide in an odd manner, due to a shared theme: Death.

I have spent a great deal of my life contemplating death. I have, on several occasions, attempted to end my own life. The last occasion, in the summer of 2011, was so very nearly successful that I have found people have acted differently around me since. Friends, family, it’s like they caught a glimpse of something horrific, something so utterly terrifying that they are almost afraid to look at me in case they see it again.

I did not truly understand this reaction. I understood, in the abstract, the notion that people hate the thought of someone they love taking their own life, because it means they will have to mourn the loss. They will have to grieve. And that will be unpleasant for them. I have often heard it said that the act of suicide is one of the most selfish things a person can do, and I have been told—by more than one friend or relative—that I ‘have’ to keep living because it would be unfair of me to die. It would be selfish of me to inflict the pain of losing me on people for whom I profess I care.

I have never seen it this way, and have in fact always viewed it from the alternate perspective: I have always found it utterly selfish of my friends and family to expect me to live through times in my life when I have wanted nothing more than to die. Since my diagnosis and the start of proper treatment and medication, as my life has so painfully slowly started to get back on track and I have begun, ever so cautiously, to hope that the worst is behind me, I find myself wishing less and less that I were dead. As I’m sure you can understand, everyone I know seems pleased by this, but I still find it incredibly hard to articulate to anyone ‘in the throws’, as it were, of an episode, exactly why it is a bad idea to try and kill themselves.

After all, it’s rather hypocritical, is it not, for me to sit there and say ‘no matter how bad it gets, you should never resort to that, it’s not an answer’, for I myself HAVE resorted to that, because at the time it felt very much like it WAS the only answer. When I was feeling like that I despised those people around me who told me I couldn’t do the one thing I was absolutely convinced would end my suffering. As a result, I feel useless when confronted by a person in that state of mind, because I know full well there is not one single thing—and I really do mean NOT. ONE. SINGLE. THING—that can be said to make them feel better, and anything you do say is likely to make it worse.

To that end—and here we come to my good news—I began writing a series of books exploring notions such as these, in an effort to provide something tangible to those people who felt like I had, both in the past and often during the time I was writing the first one.

Chasing Azrael is a novel about Death. More specifically, it is a novel about the obsession with Death, and how it can lead people to take their own lives, or spend so much of their time fixating on taking their own lives that they have no real life to speak of anyway. I began this novel in 2010, when I was first diagnosed with rapid cycling, Bipolar Disorder I. For the first time in my life I had a reason for some of the things that had happened to me, the way I had felt at certain times, and the possibility that it might get better. I was, to my horror, to find that it had to get considerably worse before things ultimately began to improve, but as I wrote my book, and tackled issues of plot, and dialogue, and characterisation, I found it was something I could hold onto in times when I was feeling impossibly low.

I designed the novel very carefully. It is not a manual for suicide, but rather a warning for those who contemplate it, and for the people in their lives who may—albeit unwittingly—be pushing them towards it through sheer ignorance. For years I had lived with friends and family who could not understand my often utterly irrational behaviour. My relationships with most of my family were strained, and the friends I had one by one fell away, until I was, at one stage, left with absolutely nobody but my brother, to whom I am eternally grateful for always standing by me, giving me a place to stay and a job. When I was diagnosed this changed. People became more understanding. Some of the friends who had abandoned me came back, realising that whatever it was I had done to upset them I had not intended, I had not meant, and more often than not I had not had the slightest amount of control over. The same was true of my family. My mother and sister are now a huge part of my life, something that was simply never the case before, as neither of them could understand me, and I resented them for it. My brother, on the other hand, went the other way. We have grown apart since, partly due to him getting a girlfriend, settling down, and us seeing less and less of each other, but partly also because the mention of my condition unnerves him. It makes him… uncomfortable. You can see it in his face whenever it comes up in conversation. I do not think he is consciously aware of it, but for whatever reason, he won’t talk about it. Almost as if, if he can pretend it’s not there, somehow it will go away and stop bothering his little sister.

This reaction is understandable, but it is not helpful. To a person who has a condition like bipolar, it is necessary for the people in their lives to be as understanding as they can manage to be, to have as much comprehension of their condition as they can, if for no other reason than to keep them from saying things like ‘well, we’re all down sometimes’, when you’ve phoned them from the railings of a very high bridge and are on the verge of jumping. The people in your life need to know what they can and can’t say when you are in the various states that overtake you. They need to know how best to handle you, and when they are really best not handling you at all. Perhaps most importantly though, they need to acknowledge that you have a mental health illness, that this is not your fault, that it doesn’t make you ‘wrong’ in the head, or any less of human being, and that it is no different, not really, to any number of physical condition such as diabetes. One involves changing levels of insulin over which you have no control, the other involves changing brain chemicals over which you are similarly powerless.

To that end, I also wanted my books to provide people who didn’t have any kind of mental health problems with a deeper understanding of what it is like to live with such conditions. It’s a tall order, but I would like nothing more than for someone with no history of depression to pick up my book, read it, and come away not only having (hopefully) enjoyed a good story, but also with the feeling that they know, at least a little, what it is like to live with being depressed, to such an extent that you regularly consider ending your own life, and that to you, that is not an abhorrent or selfish act to contemplate, it is the light at the end of a tunnel full of horrors, the glimmer of hope in an otherwise desolate landscape. I want them to come away understanding why to people like me, it isn’t the ones who commits suicide who appears selfish, but the ones who repeatedly keep a person from dying. In short, I want to pick my readers up, take them to the very brink of insanity, then yank them back to the world of the living, a place where yes, they can acknowledge how bad it gets, yes, they can understand the impulse to do it, the need to have it over, but they can also see that there is a way back from that place.

I want the people who have stood on that bridge to know there is a way down.

And I want the people who have been on the other end of the phone while they were up there to know that once they are down, they can find a way to have a life again.

It’s a long time since I have actively contemplated killing myself. I had a slightly dicey few weeks around October-December last year when I recognised how I was feeling and I knew it was possible I’d get that impulse again. I handed my MEDs over to my mother who has had them under lock and key ever since.

You are probably wondering how on earth I can possibly class this as ‘happy’ news, and if this is the good, what the hell is the sad?

Well, the happy news is that Chasing Azrael is soon to be released on the world. As of the 26^th of April it will be available in paperback and Kindle formats, from Amazon and a host of other retailers, as well as directly from myself. For those of you who read this blog regularly and enjoy my writing, I hope that you will pick up a copy, but more than that, I hope that you will let me know what you think of it. I am still writing the remaining books in the series, and I want to ensure the rest—one in particular, which is very personal to me—really achieve the effect I have in mind.

And this of course leads me to the sad news. I have begun to understand over the last week or so why it is my friends and family have had that look about them since my last suicide attempt so very nearly worked. On the 5^th of January I lost a very dear friend. To say that her death was unexpected would be redefining the word to mean something infinitely stronger than its current denotation. She was young; she was healthy; she has three teenage children. I was speaking to her on January 1^st. We were thanking each other for our respective Christmas cards and talking about AuthorCon, a convention of independently published authors which is taking place in Manchester, on April 26^th, and at which I will be launching my book. Lindsey, also a writer, had booked a table and was planning to come up, along with another friend of ours (again, another writer, you can see a trend here…), so that it would be the three of us signing books at the convention. I was incredibly excited about this, not only because it was my book launch but because it meant meeting Lindsey in the flesh. The latter was pleasing because despite her being a very good friend, we never actually met. We knew each other only via an online writing group of which we are both members.

She went out for a walk with her family later that day, came home, began complaining of back pains, and was rushed to hospital. Despite an operation that appeared to be successful, she was placed in a medically induced coma. She never woke up. I cannot adequately describe the utter shock, and horror, that I felt when I was told. I have lost people before, but only elderly relatives, people who had been ill for prolonged periods of time and whose death was, while still terribly painful, not unexpected and in some ways a relief, as you knew it was inevitable, and hated seeing them in that amount of pain.

Now I know what horror it was my friends and family glimpsed, that last time I tried to die.

Now I understand why people say it’s selfish.

It’s not because they enjoy seeing you in pain, not because they think it’s better that you suffer than they do, it’s the sheer fallout of it. The impact one death has is as a fall of a well-placed domino; one goes down, the rest soon follow. I do not know Lindsey’s family, although they have been in my thoughts a lot these past days. I do however know a lot of her online friends, many of whom were in our writing group, and many of whom are currently feeling as lost and broken as I am over the whole thing. The shock is bad enough. The loss when you have actually managed to process it is unbearable.

The issue that I have here is that I only ever knew Lindsey online. I found myself sending her an invitation via Facebook yesterday, because for a few moments I forgot. It was second nature to me, to include her in the things I do. I hit the invite button and immediately felt a fresh wave of grief, as if being told for the first time all over again. There is an oddness to the internet. Her profile is still there, so in many respects she has the appearance of still being there, as much as she ever was previously. It takes a minute to recall that she is no longer on the other end of this infinite thing we call ‘Internet’.

And that thought got me wondering. If my entire friendship with Lindsey can take place across the vast void of cyberspace, can it not somehow continue across the void that now exists between this world, the ‘living’ worlds, and wherever it is she has gone?

I am not a religious person, but I have spent a considerable amount of time thinking about what happens to a person after they die. Chasing Azrael can be described in many ways. It’s urban fantasy; a supernatural mystery; gothic literature, but at the heart it is one very simple thing: it’s a ghost story.

Throughout the book I explore why people die, as well as what happens to them afterwards. I have often wondered what, had I been successful in any of my attempts, would have happened to me after. Would I truly have felt any better? Would the bipolar be gone once I no longer had a physical brain with that pesky chemical imbalance? If I no longer had bipolar, would my personality alter drastically, or would I still possess all the same flaws I currently have, because the bipolar did not cause them, but merely amplified them, the repeated trauma experienced as a result of my mood swings affecting the person I was to the point that, even if you took the bipolar away, and I no longer had that awful pendulum in my head, I would still be as I had become as a result of my experiences. It’s easy to blame it all on the bipolar, but one must also take responsibility for one’s own actions, one’s own faults, and acknowledge that while you may not have developed them were it not for the bipolar, once you have them, and are aware of them, it is your responsibly to control them wherever possible.

This week I have found myself thinking about Lindsey, and whether or not she is ‘out there’ somewhere, in a world such as the ghostly world I have imagined for my novels. I wonder if she can see how much she is missed, and how much she is loved, and I wonder if that would make it easier or harder for her. I am still working on the final edits of the novel, and I have to say that having so recently suffered the loss of a friend I find myself looking at it with new eyes.

Lindsey was a great writer, a wonderful friend, and a great help to me at a time when I was very much alone and my life was a complete mess. She read several drafts of my novel, offering comments and help on each, and was supposed to be present on the day it was launched. I will miss her terribly, and although I look forward to the release of my novel, I know the day will be tinged with grief no matter my excitement, because someone who should have been there, won’t be.

Or will she?

I realises this has been a much longer post than usual, and I thank those of you who have taken the time to read to the end. I would also like to leave you with a final thought for consideration:

Death can only be an answer if you fully understand the question, and it is difficult to understand anything fully when you are in the midst of a depressive episode.

Moreover, death may not be the end you think it is, and if it isn’t, if you wake in some new world to find you’re just as broken in that one as you were in this one, what will you do then?

There will be nothing to do but stare down at the ones you left behind, and watch them all fall after you.

Runner

Since the end of October I have been slouching ever further into my annual winter depression. Since I was diagnosed with rapid cycling Bipolar 1 Disorder in 2010, I have dedicated a great deal of time to trying to understand what that diagnosis actually means for me. I have looked back on my past experiences and mapped out exactly when my worst moods have been, and the consequences those times have had, both on my short term existence, and in the long term, to my life as a whole. I have realised that the key to remaining as healthy as possible is to ANTICIPATE and PREPARE as much as possible. It is not always possible to predict when your mood will shift but it is possible to have things in place, stop gaps if you will, to ensure that if things do go wrong, they can only go wrong to a certain extent.

My aim over the last few years has been to devise strategies that ensure the horrendous actions I have taken in the past while either low or high never happen again.

To that end, I made certain plans beginning in October last year. I had been very hopeful, given how well I had felt through the summer in comparison to previous years, that I might escape winter without another episode. When it became apparent that this was not going to be the case after all, I came up with a plan. There were four steps in this plan, each designed to ensure I minimised the damage caused by my impending gloom.

Step One was to ensure my diet did not slide as it has done during depressed moods in the past. My aim was not to continue losing weight, as I had been doing relatively well over summer, but to simply maintain my weight at the level it was at and prevent myself from regaining the two stone I had managed to lose.

I am afraid to say I have failed miserably in this regard and once again find myself in a New Year, contemplating a new start to my dieting battle, and trying to figure out how to actually make something stick.

Step Two in my plan was to invest in a Light Box. I had intended to do this at the beginning of November so that I would have this supposedly magical light therapy to keep me going throughout the winter and hopefully keep my mood from degenerating. Unfortunately, I failed here too. These light boxes are very expensive, and after considerable research (which I will detail for you in a later post) I determined that I really needed to get the ‘proper’ one, which was twice as expensive as any others, if I expected it to actually work. This was, unfortunately, £100 that I simply did not have to spare, especially with Christmas coming up and my business only just getting off the ground. I asked my mum to get me one as a Christmas present, but give it to me early so that I would have some relief throughout November and December, which in general are my worst times. She refused, it wasn’t ‘fun’ enough for a Christmas present, she wanted to get me something ‘nice’, and most of all she hates not having something to give me ‘on the day’. I cried about this more than I care to admit. Aside from anything else I hate Christmas as a general rule and can never wait for it to be over. But no matter what I said I could not get her to understand that the nicest thing anyone could possibly do for me, was give me something that might have a tangible benefit, something that might actually make the unmitigated hell I was starting to endure even the tiniest bit better.

As it happens, Christmas Day came around and Mum presented me with a lovely little card telling me I could get any Light Box I chose. Once again, I was fighting off tears, one out of relief (Christmas and New Year were NOT pleasant for me) and two because despite my gratitude at the gesture I couldn’t help but think ‘Why didn’t you let me have it early? If it works I wouldn’t have felt so bad all this time’. I was at once overcome with gratitude and very annoyed with her for not understanding.

I have now had my chosen light box up and running for six days. I do not feel that is ample time yet to pass comment on it fully, when I have had it working longer I will give a full report for those of you who are interested. I will say however, that I’m leaning towards believing it works.

The third step in my plan actually turned out to be the hardest, despite my failures elsewhere. Turning triggers into happy memories is not an easy thing to do. Triggers are so called for a reason. Even if you approach them knowing the affect they can have, trying to transform them into something positive, it is very difficult to prevent your body from reacting in a way that is essentially hardwired into you.

Step four has proven to be a success, although it has nearly killed me maintaining it.

Keeping myself busy. By this I did not simply mean making sure I had plenty of work to do, I meant ensuring that my mind was fully occupied every waking second of the day. This is not an easy thing for me to do. Few things fully occupy my brain, and I am well aware that this is a classic bipolar trait and one to which many of you will likely relate. I can’t simply watch television to relax. Unless I’m watching something UTTERLY ENTHRALLING, which really doesn’t happen very often, despite the fact there are many TV shows and films I love, I find I have to be doing something mentally challenging at the same time. I work on my laptop, I write, I draw, I knit ridiculously complex patterns, the list goes on.

For November I sensibly planned to take part in NaNoWriMo and this proved to be a gift from the Gods. At first it was simply an incentive to write at home, but I soon found myself too dispirited and forced myself to go to the Write In sessions in Chester, with real people. I found that not only did I have the distraction I so desperately needed, I also had a growing number of friends.

This is almost unheard of for me. I have many virtual friends, but very few friends in the ‘real world’. Until now.

December on the other hand was very different. With the end of NaNo I found myself struggling. I been going flat out throughout half of October and the whole of November, never pausing for anything relaxing, never stopping long enough to so much as read a book because it wasn’t enough. I had spent six weeks doing nothing but work, work, work, and when I found I was too exhausted to work anymore I was dreaming up other forms of non-work related challenges to keep me going.

I took on extra freelance work, partly to keep myself busy, partly because I needed the money. By mid December I felt as if I were a runner on a treadmill, only it was placed at the very edge of an extremely high cliff. Behind me lay a sheer drop, of hundreds of feet, into a shark infested ocean. I had been running on that treadmill for a very long time at a phenomenal speed. Running was good, it was helping, it was keeping my brain busy, it was what I needed to keep myself from jumping over that cliff, but it was also dangerous; if I slowed down, even a little, that treadmill would fling me backwards and down into the waiting jaws of those sharks just as surely as I would throw myself over if I let the despair get any worse.

I was in an impossible situation. I had no choice but be on that treadmill, for the treadmill in this analogy is my own, strange, bipolar brain. I could no more get off it than I can will myself to stop being bipolar. So I had two choices, I could run, or I could go over the cliff.

I’ve been over that cliff before. It aint pretty. It’s a bitch to climb back up, and there are those damnable sharks snapping at your heels the whole way, dragging you back down again the second you make any progress.

The trick is to never end up at the bottom of the cliff in the first place, and so I had chosen to run.

But fuck me it was exhausting.

I don’t mean slightly tiring, or ‘oh I could really use a nap’. I’m not talking about the feeling you get when you’ve pulled an all-nighter, and you feel hungover even though you weren’t drinking the night before. I’m not even talking about the chronic lethargy that afflicts me when I am severely depressed and simply can’t get out of bed.

In my life before I have never felt that tired.

I would never have believed it was possible to feel that tired.

And sleep of course was no respite. In sleep I dreamed and with my mind in the state it was at the time they were not pleasant. They were vivid, borderline hallucinatory, and they didn’t stop. Every night I endured the horrors. Every day I ran as if my life depended on it, because it did.

Slowly I can feel myself pulling out of it now. Gradually I can feel my mood begin to turn. I hope this is actually the case and not simply wishful thinking. I hope the Light Box is actually helping, and I am not simply experiencing a placebo effect. I hope that soon I can get off the treadmill.

As determined as I am to kick this cycle’s arse, I can’t keep running forever.

Wide Open

Tonight I decided not to take my MEDs. Not all of them at least.

The day started badly. I over-slept. I then struggled to drag myself out of bed even when I did manage to wake up. The issue was not that I did not want to get up–I was supposed to be in Chester for 1 o’clock to meet my writing group. I’d been looking forward to it. I really wanted to go. One of the guys who doesn’t make it very often but with whom I get along very well was going to be there. Several of the regulars with whom I also get along very well were going to be there. I had every reason to get up, yet could not keep my eyes open.

This happens regularly. It is a result of the anti-psychotic medication that I take, which contains a sedative and essentially ensures I sleep for at least 12 hours a day. This is a nightmare (no pun intended) to contend with when I am very busy with work, and now that I’m actually forming some kind of social life it is making things impossible.

When I finally did get up the day did not improve. I was very late getting to Chester. Despite my best efforts to make myself look presentable I still felt like a frump, a hippo, a great whale of a thing, all dressed in black trying pitifully to emulate her former (much skinnier) self. There were new people at my writing group and I was not in the best frame of mind to be encountering people I didn’t know. One of them seemed (to me at least) to be very hostile, something which put me on edge, made me irritable, and upset me quite a bit. It is entirely possible, on reflection, that this was only my interpretation of the situation and not how she was actually acting, but even so, it was one more dent in my day. There was general tension in the group due to various factor and, to cap it all off, I had a headache that refused to go away. I felt generally shit, and unfortunately seem to have repeated this fact regularly which evidently because annoying after a while. I then felt bad for annoying everyone.

On the drive home I found myself second guessing everything I said and did, fretting that I’d offended people, that I’d made a fool of myself, that I’d ruined my new friendships which are, it has to be said, very important to me. I was catastrophising to the extreme. By the time I was half way home I was in floods of tears for no real reason.

I got home and went online and tried to find people to talk to only to find cyberspace deserted. Without anyone to tell me otherwise, I assumed this meant everyone hated me.

It came time to take my nighttime MEDs and I found myself staring at them and thinking that, if only I’d woken up properly, the day might have been so much different, if only I didn’t have to take the damn things, I would never have gained so much weight, if only I wasn’t Bipolar, my life would be completely different.

And something in me snapped completely.

A flood gate opened.

More tears followed. A lot more tears. But they were not the silent, empty, numb tears to which I have become so accustomed over the last six years or so, they were the raw, heart wrenching, air-gulping, desperate tears of a person who has just experienced heart break for the first time, or suffered the death of someone very close to them. They were the tears I have been refusing to shed for years, for things I have been refusing to feel.

A long time ago now, something happened to me. I lost someone, someone I loved, someone I thought I would never, ever loose. A lot of things contributed to this, but I believe the major factor was simply that I am bipolar and at the time was completely unaware of it. I was extremely ill and he was forced to deal with me, constantly, with no comprehension of why I was acting the way I was, and no respite because he was the only person who could make me feel even remotely safe.

Losing him broke me.

I don’t mean it broke my heart–although it did, there is no denying that–I mean it broke something within me. When I say he was the only person who could make me feel better, I mean it. Without him, I totally fell apart. My depressive cycles became more extreme, my manic periods utterly unmanageable. I grew steadily worse with nobody to look after me and still, I had no idea what was wrong, or even that there was anything wrong. I was told repeatedly that I was being ‘melodramatic’ that I was ‘overreacting’ that it was ‘just a break-up’ and a ‘normal part of growing up’, all of which was true, however it wasn’t the full story.

For me, it wasn’t the breakdown of the relationship that left me so devastated, but the loss of the only person who had ever been able to calm me; he pulled me up when I was down, and he reigned me in when I was high. He did this without even realising he was doing it, and I have no idea how he managed it, save perhaps the fact that I loved him enough for his influence to have real meaning. I’ve certainly never felt that way about anyone since, but then I’m not sure I’ve felt anything real for anyone since, for in order to get things under control, to stop all the ‘melodrama’, and do as everyone demanded of me and ‘get over it’, I shut down. I stopped feeling normal feelings, I stopped having the every day emotions that most people experience. I was left with nothing but the extreme moods I endured in the rapid cycling of my (at that point still un-diagnosed) mental illness. Eventually it was diagnosed. I put a name to it. I began to understand it, even to accept it to some degree. But this did not fix what was broken by that loss.

A great many things have happened to me since then. Upsetting things, traumatic things, things that most people don’t ever have to deal with, and things that everyone has to deal with at some point in their lives, to some extent. I have felt none of these things. When I’m manic I am too high to care. When I’m depressed I feel nothing but the dragging, empty depression, which is not so much feeling anything as it is the absence of feeling: a desolate, hollow, persistent dread. In the rare times when I am neither high nor low, I have simply felt nothing.

I have had another relationship fall apart, lost two jobs, lost my flat, lost almost all my friends, watched my parents divorce and my mother and siblings fall apart as a result of my father’s departure, dealt with his continued absence and the various other changes that went with that, become involved in a highly inappropriate relationship as a direct result of the absence of any kind of father figure in my life, had that relationship fall apart, attempted to kill myself twice, very nearly succeeded once, had my house burn down around me, been left in vast debts due to my mania and my most recent ex, lost all independence and had to move back in with my mother, endured my Nan–one of the most important people in my life and arguably the member of my family I loved most until the birth of my neice–pass away, and I have failed (thus far) to either complete my thesis or lose all the weight I have gained.

I have felt none of this.

I have cared about none of this.

I have experience it, but I have not FELT it.

Not until tonight.

Tonight something snapped, and in so doing, oddly, it seems to have mended a thing long broken. I didn’t decide against taking my MEDs out of protest, or because I think I no longer need them, or even because I want to stop taking them permanently.

I simply made a conscious choice not to take them TONIGHT. For the first time in a very long time I am feeling the things I am supposed to feel. It is overwhelming, and frightening. I am feeling them all at once, and all in a jumble. I don’t understand most of it, and it hurts like hell. But I do not want to take the easy way out. I do not want to consign myself to oblivion and wake up tomorrow without these feelings in me. They hurt, yes, but they’re supposed to hurt. Being human does hurt. And I can’t help but feel that in a strange way, that distance I have felt these last years, that hollowness and lack of connection or emotion has somehow, far more so than any illness, made me just a little less than human.

I don’t want to sleep any longer.

It’s time to wake up, and face the world with my eyes–and emotions–wide open.