bipolar disorder – Page 2 – The Daily Opinion

The Ear Worm…

For the last few weeks I’ve had a particular song stuck in my head. I have been singing it to myself constantly. I have been perpetually playing it on repeat. I have become rather obsessed with this song.

This happens to me sometimes, as it does everyone. I once had the theme tune from The Famous Grouse adverts running round and round in my head for about two years. Every time I thought I’d got rid of it, up it would pot again to annoy me.

This isn’t like that. I do not find the fact this song will not leave me alone annoying. I am not being driven mad by it, I am embracing it. I am actually purposefully immersing myself in it. This usually happens to me when something about the song hold meaning, for me at least, and I’m trying to fathom out just what that meaning is.

From the first time I heard it, something about it grabbed me and I knew-without really understanding why at the time, for I wasn’t really listening to the lyrics-that there was something about this song that was very important to me.

The song in question is Lady Gaga’s ‘Dope’.

The reason I am finding this song so mesmerising is that there is one particular line which encapsulates a feeling I know very, very well:

‘Been hurting low from living high for so long’.

This doesn’t resonate with me because I have a drug problem, but rather because I have a brain chemistry problem which quite regularly sends me so high that, when I inevitably come down, it hurts.

A lot.

My worst periods of mania are always, always, always followed by a period of extreme depression. This never occurs to me while I’m manic; while I’m manic, nothing occurs to me, I just go about my insane business believing myself to be generally wonderful and, of course, completely invincible. The thought that anything could ever hurt me is inconceivable, yet the very fact I am manic is the prelude to a period of unbearable pain. I know this. Somewhere in my mind I retain this information, even when I’m high. I believe this is part of the reason so many people who suffer from mania refuse treatment while manic, avoid dealing with their mania, and generally will do anything to perpetuate the euphoria rather than allowing themselves to ‘come down’. Because we never just come down. We don’t suddenly find ourselves evening out and feeling ‘normal’ again.

We crash.

Hard.

And it hurts.

Sometimes the crash is so bad it feels like it will kill us.

Sometimes, it does kill us.

I know people who did not make it through the crash. They couldn’t manage the depression. It hurt too badly, it was too much to deal with and (as I have tried to do myself, several times when feeling like this) they took their own lives. This is a sad truth of the bipolar existence; sometimes it literally kills us.

Mania has a lot of consequences, knock on effects that follow you throughout the rest of your life, seeming to punish you for ever having the audacity to give in to the euphoria. Depression has its consequences also, debilitating you, ruining your self-confidence, ruining your body, robbing you of your self-respect and, if you’re not very careful, robbing you of your life.

When we’re neither up, nor down, it is possible to acknowledge these things and understand that the best thing for us is to avoid both states wherever possible. This would seem obvious, surely, it’s a no-brainer, don’t get high, don’t get low, stay in the middle, where it’s safe and you’ll never get hurt by either state.

It’s not so simple.

Not long ago my psychiatrist wanted to switch my MEDs to lithium-based substances, as the mood stabalisers I am on are currently at the highest safe dose and still aren’t curtailing the rapid cycles of my mood. I refused. Lithium, I was told, would even me out. At the time I said I didn’t want to be evened out, I didn’t want to be ‘flat’. I still maintain this is true, however I now think perhaps there is more to it.

The cycles of my bipolar have become such an intrinsic part of my personality that I honestly do not know who or what I would be without it. Would I have the same cynical, sarcastic sense of humour if I no longer felt depressed? Would I still be able to write the way I do, think the way I do, if I no longer experience mania? These are not things I am willing to risk losing, even if the consequence—the depression—and the risks—the possibility I’ll one day successfully kill myself—are so real.

How many people are so sure of themselves, so certain that they are who they were meant to be, that they won’t give it up, no matter the cost? I would wager there aren’t many. I would further posit that this is another gift of this ‘disorder’.

This is not to say that I don’t want to get ‘better’, but ‘better’ for me means learning to deal with my moods more effectively, understanding why I react the way I do to certain situations and, perhaps, taming the beast a little. It does not mean eradicating myself. It means acknowledging the fact that I’m still going to feel low from living high, and I need to figure out how to get through that when it happens.

Because it will keep happening.

That’s just me.

And I’m surprised to find that, for the first time in my life, I’m perfectly fine with that.

The Best Laid Plans …

As you know, I came up with a great, grand plan for how I was going to survive the inevitable winter blues. The plan was relatively simple, albeit in four parts. One aspect of this plan was to ensure I kept myself distracted and occupied. To that end, I resolved to take part in National Novel Writing Month. This is something that takes place every year, in November, and is something I have always wanted to do but never quite got around to.

My efforts—despite the best of intentions—got off to a poor start as the first day of this particular month is also the anniversary of my Nanny’s death. So, while budding writers up and down the country were chugging coffee and refusing to detach themselves from their computers for longer than it took to go to the toilet or re-fill their mugs, I was with my family. My word count at the end of the day was a measly 84. Not to worry, I thought, I’ll make up for it at the weekend. Saturday passed with only a few more words written, while Sunday saw no progress at all. A slight improvement was made on Monday and I managed to inch my way up to 2720 words, but progress then stopped.

Completely.

Until Sunday.

Having resolved to actually do this thing, and even asked for sponsorship towards it, watching the days tick by without any progress being made was rapidly ceasing to be something which improved my mood and becoming something which only served to worsen it. NaNoWriMo was becoming just another thing at which I was failing.

Miserably.

On Saturday I became annoyed about this, and I said to myself “Self, this simply will not do.”

I have been getting emails since signing up for NaNoWriMo and my regional group (Chester), to come to their ‘Write-Ins’—basically a load of people sitting in a pub, all writing together, instead of sitting alone, at home, distracting themselves with Facebook, Twitter, and whatever happens to be currently trending on YouTube. The aim of these events is to encourage people to keep writing, to give them a little moral support, and also to meet like-minded people. I did not think for one second when I signed up my online account that I would ever being doing this thing in the ‘real world’. To me it was just another virtual activity I would conduct over the internet and I was perfectly happy with that idea, until last night.

Saturday night I decided (against all logic and normal behaviour) that the solution to the problem was to go to one of these write-ins and spend a whole afternoon in the presence of real people who would encourage me to write.

I found this quite a shocking decision.

More astonishing still was the fact that Sunday dawned and I hadn’t changed my mind. In fact, I did all my jobs with alarming speed hopped in the shower with peculiar gusto (yes, really, enthused about a shower!) and even, dried my hair. With a hair dryer. This is unheard of; the effort it takes is phenomenal, plus it’s always too hot and gives me a headache. Not only that, I applied makeup.

So, wearing my nicest dress (and actually feeling nice in it, despite having re-gained some weight) I toddled off to Chester (bit of a trek) and tracked down the location of this social event. Now, despite many hurdles (it wasn’t where I thought it was, when I finally did find it there was nowhere to park, when I finally did park there was a long walk to the place, when I finally got there I realised it was a Weatherspoons I had at one point actually frequented with my (now ex) fiancé, once I convinced myself to go in any way I couldn’t find the people I was looking for, once I did find them there were only two small tables and I was forced to actually sit next to people and … you know … talk), once I’d got over all that, I found the strangest thing happening. I had a GREAT time. Not only that, I wrote about five thousand words. I met some new people who were both amusing and very nice, I’m fairly convinced I managed to interact with them without doing anything that screamed ‘I’m a total head case, RUN while you still have chance’, and better still I found myself asking when the next one was. Tuesday you say? Great, see you then.

To fully understand the importance of this please let me explain something. For the past two years I have not had any interactions with new people, with the exception of those met during group therapy, once last year and once this year, and the various people with dogs I pass while walking Dexter. I may nod to the latter occasionally and talk to their dogs, but I rarely make eye contact with the human half of the pair, and even less frequently manage to actually talk.

The only other people I have seen are family and two friends so close they may as well be family.

That’s it.

So, for me, this was quite a big deal. I think the strangest thing about it is that I expected to get home and have a total panic attack about it. I expected to be hit with the usual merry-go-round of ‘did I sound stupid when I said this’, ‘what did they mean when they said that’, ‘how could I possibly have allowed myself to go out in public while I’m this fat’.

It never happened.

It still hasn’t.

There is another one tomorrow which I am fully intending to go to. What’s more, I’m looking forward to it.

As I’ve mentioned before I’m currently attending group therapy. Last year I did the same thing, and while I met a couple of nice people with whom I’m still in touch, I didn’t really feel I got anything from the group itself. I was told an awful lot about bipolar disorder which I had already found out for myself. It gave me no deeper understanding of why I reacted to certain things in certain ways. It did nothing to help me identify my own trouble areas and try to find ways to break the bad patterns I’ve been stuck in for years. This year, group is very different. It’s very difficult, it’s emotionally draining, often has me in tears, it is physically and mentally exhausting however, it also appears to be working.

For those of you looking to get any kind of therapy, take my advice. Unless you know absolutely nothing about bipolar, avoid CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy), it will frustrate you, demoralise you, and generally leave you with the impression that therapy is pointless. It took some convincing and the threat of lithium for me to try again. Instead, opt for CAT. No, I’m not referring to the fluffy feline, although they make great companions if you’re a loner like I am and don’t like dogs. I’m talking about Cognitive Analytic Therapy.

I’m halfway through my treatment, and I’m actually finding myself able to go out, try new things, meet new people, and above all enjoy doing so.

This is, in my opinion, a minor miracle.

Multitasking

Today I have, as usual, been trying to do too many things at once. I am regularly told by people that this is a terrible thing, that I shouldn’t do it, that by trying to do so many things at once I end up doing nothing very well.

I sincerely hope this isn’t the case, however I find that, whether or not it’s true, I have very little choice in the matter.

Concentration is often an issue for me. I suffer from a total absence or over-abundance of it at various times, and find that in order to be productive in any way I must adapt accordingly. When my concentration levels are at zero, I ensure I have many things all neatly lined up that need working one, so that I can spend as long as I can manage focused on one thing, then move on to the next without feeling like a failure. I remain on this task as long as I can, then move on again, and so on, until I ultimately end up back where I started. Having spent so much time thinking about so many other things, refreshed enough to once again tackle the original task. This I find is the best way to handle myself at times when working on one thing for a protracted period is impossible.

I am (again) often told that I should rest at times like this. ‘Just relax’. The problem I have is that if my mind becomes quiet, if it is not occupied by whatever it is I am doing, either because what I am doing is ‘relaxing’ or because I’ve been trying to concentrate on one thing for too long, one of two things happen: I zone out completely and am often lost in an abyss for weeks, even months at a time; or my head becomes filled with unwanted thoughts and images, yes even voices, which are not only extremely upsetting, they can drive me to the brink of sanity. I can lose my reason entirely at times like this, if I am not very, very careful.

I have been existing in such a state for just over a month now. It began around the end of September and has been getting steadily worse since. My solution, thus far, seems to be working. I have a great many projects on the go and spend a little time doing one then move on to the next. This is totally at odds with how I can be at other times, when I become utterly fixated on one particular thing and will do absolutely nothing else, including eating, sleeping, bathing and leaving the house.

Both these mindsets are a reaction to the mood-state I am in at the time. I am often frustrated, and in fact quite aggravated by the fact that people think they know what’s best for me. If I’m bouncing, one task to another, I’m told to slow down, focus, stop taking on too much. If I’m fixated on one particular thing I’m told I’m being obsessive, that I’ll burn out, that there’s no need for it all to be done right now, to ‘take a break’. The reason I find all these things so infuriating is that if I am doing one or the other of them, it is because I am trying, desperately, to stave off another doozy of a mood swing. I am teetering on the brink of a bad depression and trying every single thing I can think of to stave it off. I am about to hurtle into the stratosphere and, rather than contend with the usual side effects of mania, I am channelling all that energy, all that insanity, into something constructive, in the hopes of avoiding the catastrophic consequences of such states I have experienced in the past.

Getting people to understand this is extremely difficult. In particular, they emphasise that you will exhaust yourself or become ‘run down’ and that this will, inevitably, make you feel worse. What they don’t understand is that these things we do to keep ourselves sane are coping strategies. They may not be perfect, they may have some unpleasant side effects, but the fact is they work—to one degree or another—if they didn’t we wouldn’t keep doing them. That is psychology. That is something I have learned over the last few weeks in group therapy.

So, if you are doing something because you need to, because it is helping you cope, don’t automatically assume it is wrong just because other people can’t understand it. It may not be perfect. It may have unfortunate side effects. But there is something there that helps you, and anything that helps should not be thrown away. The trick is identifying what is helpful about it and what is unhelpful and separating out the two, so that you are left with a helpful coping strategy which gets you through the tough times, but doesn’t have all of those unwanted side effects.

I’m still working on the last part. In the interim, I’m multi-tasking.

And there is nothing wrong with that.

Beating the Blues

I have mentioned before that I always find myself slipping into a depression in the autumn and winter time. Despite the fact that autumn is my favourite season—I love the colours—by the start of October I am already starting to feel the bite, and I don’t mean the cold.

This year is proving to be no different. The healthy eating, weight loss, and generally positive attitude that I’ve managed to maintain since July suddenly vanished a few weeks ago. I am too afraid to stand on the scales this week, for fear of what they will say. I worry that if I have gained a lot back, it will push me deeper down the hole.

On Tuesday, my psychologist kept me back after group because she was worried about me. I had been having suicidal thoughts, was on the verge of tears most of the time and had, to my horror, been relapsing in my fight with bulimia. All these things disturbed me greatly, perhaps more so because I hadn’t realised I was doing them until she pulled me up on it. She made me promise to hand all medication over to my mother, with the strict instruction that it be kept in a locked box, and she administers it when needed. This was not an easy thing for me to do. I’m terrible at asking for help at the best of times, but admitting I need my mother for something? It is just not within me to do such a thing, or so I thought.

Having been kept back for a considerably long time, and forced to promise I would do as she had suggested, I found myself stumbling through an explanation when I got home and trying to explain what I was feeling. I braced myself for the inevitable tirade of upset: I was selfish, I was useless, I was too much effort… then I remembered I was no longer living with my ex, and started to feel considerably better.

As it turns out, mother is a very good MED monitor, even if she is a little on the forgetful side. You should know that I do not bring up the subject of suicide idly. It is not my intention to glamourise it, to paint it as the blissful escape. In my experience the only thing accomplished by taking your own life is failure, for as it turns out, it’s a hell of a lot harder to do than you might think. Last time, I came so close to succeeding that mother has been left … I want to say traumatised, but I suspect she was traumatised the first time, and the second, and that she would have been equally traumatised for each and every other time. Traumatised is not the right word. It is difficult to find the right word, for how do you explain the fear that is cultivated in a mother who comes so close to losing their child, and is then forced to watch as old patterns repeat themselves. I often wonder, at times when I’m feeling low, if she’s wondering how I’ll do it next time and if I’ll succeed. I believe she was past the point of believing there never would be a ‘next time’, and that she was resigned to the fact that I would keep on trying. Perhaps she was even resigned to the fact that at some point, I would succeed.

This is only one reason why I worry about being on so much medication. Overdose has always been my favoured option in the past, and it just seems a little to much like tempting fate. In asking for help however, when I first started to feel those early warning signs, before I’d gone past the point of asking for help because I had a genuine death wish and would lie my arse of pretending to be happy if only it meant nobody knew what I was planning, I changed something. I changed something in myself and also in my mother’s outlook on my condition.

She no longer seems quite so … hopeless.

I also feel oddly better just for the fact that I do not have access to a (very large) stash of drugs which I might take at any time. The ‘easy out’ (which I’ve found for myself on several occasions is not at all easy) is no longer an option. That one small thing managed to lift me just enough to make me realise that there might, might, just be a way to get ahead of the winter blues this year and, if not enjoy the next four months, at least not find them quite so excruciating as usual.

With that in mind I dug my way through all my own research on Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD), why so many people with bipolar find their cycles run with the seasons, and my mood maps regarding trigger events around this time of year. The first two of these points may well apply to everyone with bipolar, at least to some extent, the latter is most definitely a personal matter, although it is certainly worth looking at your year and pinpointing the times you are at your worst, to see if there is anything going on there that causes it.

I’ve now come up with a tentative plan, involving four steps:

Step One: Do not allow my diet to slide, no matter how hard it may be. Get back to eating reasonably healthily, if not sticking to the very low calorie, low fat, intake I was on previously. My goal here is not to continue to lose weight during this troublesome period but to prevent myself from regaining the weight I was able to lose over the summer. This pattern of summer weight loss and winter re-gain is perhaps the most ingrained one I have, and I feel that breaking it would be a huge step forwards.

Step Two: Invest in a light box. I will go into more detail on this in a later post, but a light box is essentially a screen-like box (they come in various shapes and sizes, including alarm clocks) which emits blue light. This blue light has been scientifically proven to positively affect the bipolar brain. The reason so many people suffer from SAD is the low levels of natural light during the winter time, which does not only affect those with mood disorders, but many people who are normally perfectly healthy, but suffer depressive episodes during winter. The blue light simulates sunlight and helps boost the chemicals in our brains, lifting our mood. At least, so the theory goes. I’ve never tested one of these before, as they are quite expensive, however I decided it was time I invested in one to see if it actually helped. Supposedly, having it on for around one hour a day, while you work, watch TV, or read, is all it takes to compensate for the winter blues.

Step Three: Turn my triggers into happier memories. This is perhaps the most difficult thing to do. There are certain dates around this time of year that always spin me for a loop and have for years. The most recently acquired ones are the anniversaries of the fire, and my Nanny’s death, both of which occurred in 2011, within a week of each other. Last week I wrote about the fire and how my perspective has changed. I now see it as an important life event that allowed me to move on. Yes, it was painful, there is no denying that, but it was also necessary and, most importantly, it is over. The trouble with trauma is that it is so easy to let it continue indefinitely. We keep it alive in our memories by going over and over it, reliving it each year as that dreaded date comes around once more. The past does not remain in the past but lives in the present, as real as it was the first time around.

It was in realising this that I hit upon the idea of doing something to celebrate my Nanny’s passing, rather than mourn her as I have done for the past two years. She was a lady who loved afternoon tea, taken at the correct time of around 3pm, with china tea cups and cake stands of at least three tiers. She was the best of me. She saw the best in me and brought out the best in me, and it was she who said, many years ago, that I would be a writer. This was long before I had thought of writing, let alone actually written anything. Consequently, next week I shall be taking tea with my mother, sister, and niece—my dear brother, as usual, is unable to make it due to working too much.

There is another anniversary in November. One that is perhaps the most painful of all and something I still struggle to talk about eight years later. On November 6^th, when I was twenty years old I still an undergraduate, I broke up—for the millionth but absolutely final time—with my boyfriend. I have never been able to figure out what it is about that relationship that traumatised me so much. I suffered a miscarriage while we were together, and I suspect that has a lot to do with it. I was almost always convinced he was cheating on me, although I think (in hindsight) this may only actually have been true at the start, when we were still sixteen or seventeen and nothing serious. I also think it had more to do with my condition that it did the actual relationship. My moods then were insane, still fuelled by teenage hormones and angst, more often manic than depressed, although that’s not to say I didn’t suffer periods of terrible depression. Then, as now, I was rapid cycling. I was also still in the grips of bulimia, which left me a wreck for more reasons than one. Somehow, in my head, all of that became tangled up in that relationship, and it seemed to me, for years, as if he—or at least my relationship with him—was responsible for all those things.

I felt he had broken me.

It wasn’t until years later when I was finally diagnosed that I realised, I was broken long before I met him. He’s now happily married, and has just had a baby, a development which I thought, when I first heard about it, would quite literally kill me. As it happens it turned out to be the most liberating news I’ve ever received in my life. Somehow, in the intervening years, I have developed enough perspective to separate out our relationship and my mental health issues, enough to understand that he did the best he could, given the state I was in. He did, in fact, far more than most twenty year olds would have managed under the circumstances. Somehow in understanding this, the impending anniversary this year does not terrify me quite so much.

Step Four: Keep myself distracted. This may seem like an absurd thing to say, given how ridiculously busy I am, but as many of you will know, having something to do isn’t usually enough to keep you distracted, keep you occupied, keep you sane. You need many things to do, because your attention span is so short, and you flit from one project to another with the speed of a cheetah. Yes, grated, while you’re focused on one thing you’re entirely focused upon it, you might even say you are obsessed, but that focus never lasts, and if you don’t have something lined up to take its place when the mood takes you to move on, you can be in serious trouble.

At times like this I cannot stop. I cannot stop for a moment, or even a second, for if I do, I find it impossible to move again for weeks, even months.

To that end I shall this year be participating in National Novel Writing Month, taking place (as always) throughout November (see my writing blog for details).

So, October is almost over, November is almost upon me. It’s alright though, because this year, I have a plan. Whether it will work or not remains to be seen. I know a lot of you struggle with similar issues at this time of year. I hope my (possible) solutions give you some ideas as to how you might overcome your own troubles.

Just Like Robin Hood . . .

I have heard Bipolar Disorder described in many ways. Perhaps one of the most confounding descriptions I have heard is that it is like a thief, stealing from you and never giving back.

This may well be the case for many people, but it is not the case for me. Yes, bipolar is a disorder that takes a lot from you: from me it has taken, at various times in my life, my friends, my family, the only man I have every truly loved, my career, my figure, my health, my sanity, and finally, my will to live.

But it has given me a lot in return.

I see the world in a way most people simply cannot fathom. I do not say that this is a better way of viewing things, or that it makes me in any way better than those who see things the ‘normal’ way, it is simply an observation: I do see the world from a different perspective. A perspective so different in fact, that at certain times I find myself beyond frustrated, because so many people in my life are simply incapable of understanding what I’m try to say. This has nothing to do with intelligence—although it is true that many people with bipolar and similar disorders are also highly intelligent—it is a matter of perspective.

That is the gift of bipolar. An ability to look at things in a completely different way, and quite often find the beauty in them where others see nothing but mundanity. One needs only to look at the works of Van Gogh to have some understanding of what I’m speaking about; he saw the world in far greater detail than the majority of people ever could. He saw the wonder in that intricacy, the stunning nature of situations and objects that others would have found commonplace.

Van Gogh is now widely considered to have been bipolar. His insanity, for want of a better word, is well documented, but so too is his vision.

There are downsides to my cycling moods, no matter which state I am in. It has to be said that I find the depression the most difficult to deal with, the hardest to drag myself through without causing myself physical harm. It is also arguable that I do more damage to myself while manic, for I tend to act during these times, and my actions have severe consequences. The positive thing about both states however, are the insight you gain.
This is a commonality I have found many people with mental illnesses share, so much so that my fiction writing began to explore just what this meant. A series of novels was born, looking at people with various mental health issues and how they see the world as a result. These novels are heavily metaphorical, using paranormal elements and some of the more enigmatic sub-cultures in society to demonstrate various points. The very fact I was able to write them however, tells me that my ‘illness’ is not entirely bad.I am well aware that my best work has happened while I have been completely manic. I have sudden bursts of creativity and productivity, during which time I complete entire novels, huge sections of my thesis, or write full papers, in a very short space of time. These works are not always brilliant, although I am generally always convinced that they are brilliant while still in the grips of mania. What they are, however, are the building blocks of my world view. And it is so very, very different, to the view that most people have.

Such thoughts I would never have had, if it had not been for my bipolar. It is my hope that my writing will some day allow others to gain some insight into this very elusive perspective I am trying to explain. It is what I say to myself when I step on the scales each week, or catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror: my body may be ruined, but my mind is not.

Contrary to popular opinion, being ‘crazy’ does not mean you are incapable of higher though. Quite the contrary.

I know a lot of people with similar conditions to my own, and indeed other people with bipolar, who have stated categorically that, despite the fact they hate what bipolar does to their lives, were they able to take it away, rid themselves of it completely, they would choose not to.

If a magical pill existed, that could cure bipolar, would you take it?

I wouldn’t.

My psychiatrist recently offered me the option of taking lithium based MEDs. After discussing it with him at length I eventually declined. My reason for this was simple. The lithium would further stabalise my moods and decrease the depressive episodes from which I still suffer, despite the MEDs I’m on. It would make be feel, for want of a better word ‘flat’.

I have no wish to be flat.

This may sound very strange considering how horrendous this illness can be, yet I am given to understand it is not an unusual reaction for patients to have. Last week I remarked that many people, myself included, begin to heavily link their condition to their identity and, as a result, do not know who they are, or how to cope, if and when they feel ‘better’. Lithium, at least to me, seemed like a far worse curse than becoming, for want of a better word, ‘normal’.

Lithium would actually flatten out the ups and downs a person who didn’t suffer from bipolar would have.

I have an aversion to the colour beige. It is, to me, far more so than grey, the blandest colour imaginable. I currently live in a world of vibrant colour. Sometimes those colours are angry, blacks and reds, deep stains of purple and flashes of violent orange. Other times they are more bubblegum colours, pinks and lilacs, the colour the ocean always is in postcards of places you’ve never been to, but would love to see.

Lithium would make the whole world beige.

No reds, no purples, no oranges or black. No bubblegum pink and ocean blue. Just beige. Flat, unremarkable, uneventful, emotionless beige.

I may despise the negative aspects of my condition, but I also appreciate the positive sides. I know the gifts I am given, and I am not ungrateful for them. I would never wish to be without them, even if that means continuing to endure the bad, so that I might also have the good. To do otherwise, I feel, would be to become a different person entirely.

Bipolar is a thief?

Yes, there is no denying this. It is an illness that robs you of a great many things, things that can never be recovered, things that are unbearably painful to lose. But, contrary to the expression, bipolar does give back, in ways that are difficult to understand if you have never experienced them for yourself.

If bipolar is a thief, then it’s Robin Hood. And that’s perfectly fine with me.

Besotted With Psychosis

There is such a thing as being in love with your diagnosis; besotted by psychosis.

I have noticed a trend in many people who suffer from mental illnesses—including myself—to freely share with others, often people they have only just met, the fact that they are both mentally ill and taking strong medications, in particular anti-psychotics, in order to manage their condition. This does not apply to everyone (nothing ever does) but certainly some people appear to relish telling others that they are on anti-psychotics and, by so doing, that they are or have at some point been, psychotic. They wear this fact like a medal, showing with pride that they have come through something horrendous, something most people (thankfully) never have to face and can’t really understand. A war veteran, home from the front.

I believe it goes deeper than this, however, far deeper than the relatively simple need to announce to the world that yes, despite all the odds, you are still alive. You survived. I believe for many people, it is not that they are ‘showing off’ their condition, it is more that their diagnosis has become so irrevocably tied to their identity, to their sense of ‘self’, that when they are interacting with others and introducing themselves to new people, talking about their condition, even if only in passing, is unavoidable.

This is certainly not the case for everyone; many people find it incredibly difficult to discuss their condition.

I am not one of those people.

The merging of diagnosis and identity can be both a positive and negative thing. I have personally found, since being diagnosed, that knowing my condition and exploring the extreme extent to which it has affected almost every aspect of my life, for the better part of two decades, helps me to understand myself better, my past better, and to come to terms with and let go of some of the more damaging memories in my possession; memories which have, until relatively recently, refused to die. It is both comforting and enlightening to know that certain phases of my life were exacerbated by my condition, that certain decisions and situations I have never been able to understand, were actually caused by the changing chemicals in my brain, rather than a deficiency in myself, as a human being. I have become more at peace as a result of this, and find that, the better I come to understand, the less I despise myself.

These are the positives.

The flip-side (isn’t there always a flip-side?), is that I become so fixated on analysing my mind and moods and behaviour, that I often forget there have actually been periods in my life when I wasn’t either depressed or manic. Certainly in my early teens I never experience the rapid cycling moods to which I became accustomed in my late teens and twenties. I had ups and I had downs, certainly, but they were never as pronounced, never as protracted, and they almost always came with lulls in between—times when I was, for want of a better word ‘normal’. At least in so much as a young teenage girl can ever feel normal. I had problems, but they had nothing to do with my condition. Even later, there were times when I was not depressed, or manic, or psychotic, I simply was. It’s easy to lose sight of this and forget there were times when I had friends, and jobs, and hobbies, and was successful in my endeavours, comfortable in social situations, capable of functioning like most other people.

I know enough people now, suffering from bipolar or other mental illnesses, to know that this is a common development.

And it can be crippling.

It is as if being depressed, bipolar, schizophrenic, psychotic etc. has become so much a part of how we perceive and define ourselves that the notion of there being any form of ‘self’, existing without the illness, is foreign to us; it’s alien. Some people even rile at the use of the word ‘illness’. I am one of those people, at least when it comes to myself, for I do not like the connotations, the notion that being bipolar makes me ‘ill’, it makes me in some way ‘wrong’. It is the thought that other people see me as being less than I should be. It is the thought that, as a consequence of this, they only accept what I am when I am neither depressed nor manic. If I am one way or the other I am in some way ‘not myself’.

Who am I then, at these times, if not myself?

There is an inherent contradiction here in that, while I am capable of acknowledging the downsides of both depressive and manic states, while I am capable of realising they can be unhealthy for me and that I must seek help to manage my condition, while I am now, reluctantly, even willing to take very strong medication to aid me in that management, I would never, ever, think of myself as being less than myself while depressed or manic. Those states of being are still ‘me’; in fact they are the versions of me with which I am comfortable, familiar, because I understand them far better than I understand this thing called ‘normal’.

There is a famous quote from one of my favourite authors, Edgar Allan Poe: ‘I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity’. I have always loved this quote. Long before I was diagnosed with bipolar, a condition Poe himself is suspected of having suffered, I had that quote scribbled in my notebooks and written in lipstick on my bedroom mirror. It resonated with me, from a very young age. I think I was perhaps ten or eleven when I first came across it, and even then, I somehow felt what it meant for me.

Insanity is relatively easy to deal with, if you are as accustomed to it as I have become. By ‘insanity’ I refer to those periods when I have been either depressed, manic, or in particular psychotic, those times when others would tell me I ‘wasn’t myself’ and I would wonder who else I could possibly be. Depression is a separate kind of insanity I feel, for it is the definite negative area of the complex condition known as bipolar. Mania and psychosis are two entirely separate things, and from my own experience of them, can have both positive and negative consequences. Certainly I find I enjoy my manic phases, I experience a clarity of thought during those times which eludes me the rest of the time. The trouble comes when the mania goes beyond my own thought processes and niggling physical side effects such as keeping me from sleeping or eating, and results in some very dangerous behaviours. Psychosis is often extremely unpleasant, however it depends upon the form it takes. Many people find it comforting. Others find it is what they need to get through the day. I have found it, at different times in my life, terrifying beyond description and the safest I have ever felt in my life. Psychosis is not a thing easily explained, nor is mania, yet they are states that become very familiar to a person, and—like depression—the more familiar they become the easier it is to remain in them, even when you don’t particularly enjoy their effects.

There is a safety in being either depressed or manic. You know what to expect, and you know what is expected of you. That contradiction comes in again, for while I hate people perceiving me as being ‘ill’ and ‘not myself’ when I am in these states, it does give you carte blanche to some extent: no matter what you do, no matter how crazy you appear, no matter how little you manage to achieve, no matter what your appearance or manner, it all falls beneath that great banner of ‘insanity’. You are forgiven. You are absolved. You can screw up as much as you like, and the majority of people will understand that this ‘isn’t your fault’ because you’re ‘ill’. It is often far easier to remain in these states than it is to try and cope with the state that falls between the two poles, that elusive state of ‘normality’. That is not for one second to suggest that depression, mania or psychosis are pleasant, merely that they are familiar, more familiar than ‘normal’ ever could be because this is the state of which I now have the least experience.
Normality is what frightens me.

It is mundane, ordinary, the discovery that there is nothing special about me, something which I fervently believe when I am manic and psychotic and can even acknowledge to some extent when depressed. Normal is just like everyone else and, just like everyone else, if I am normal I have normal responsibilities: a job, rent, bills, acting in a socially acceptable manner. And if I am just like everyone else, I can fail just like everyone else, and this then might push me be back into the very states of being I both fear and oddly embrace. Mania, certainly, has its intoxicating allure. Even depression at times can feel like the safest option: shut down, stay down, it’s quiet down there, it’s immobile, you won’t move forward but neither will you move back. You can’t fail. You can’t be hurt, unless you hurt yourself. When you have lived a life of repeated failure and heartbreak the prospect of the latter is very appealing. I often find myself embracing mania, as it allows me to do the things I wish to do—I get so much work done, I embark on so many new projects, I do all the things I completely fail to do when depressed and far more than I could ever achieve if I were simply ‘normal’. The flip-side (again) is that mania for me now always ends with a crash; if I want to enjoy the manic periods, I must also endure the depression. I am only slightly ashamed to admit that at times it is only the thought of my next manic phase which allows me to make it through the depression relatively unscathed. This is the reason I refused to allow my psychologist to switch my MEDs to Lithium despite the fact what I currently take does not stop my swings in moods: Lithium would stop my depression, a plus, but it would also rob me of my mania. It would leave me permanently ‘normal’ and that is not something I am willing to become. The reason for this is simple: I would not then be myself.

What does this mean then, for my recovery? If getting ‘better’ means moving away from those states in which I feel like myself and towards the one state in which I feel like I’m ‘not myself’, how can I reconcile that? Taking the medications prescribed for me has certainly helped, I do not find myself at the very dangerous extremes I was experiencing previously, however I have found that I no longer recognise myself. Last week I talked about looking in the mirror and seeing someone else stare back. Some of this is the result of very long periods of depression, but some is the direct result of my attempts to recover from that depression.

I am currently attempting to lose weight, and moving towards living on my own again. I find, as I make progress in both these areas, that at times I am actually sabotaging my efforts. Self-sabotage. I see that my weight loss is going well, and I panic; what happens when I’ve lost all the weight, when I am healthy and back to looking like myself again? I’ll no longer have the buffer between me and socialising that currently protects me.

I often feel that I have purposefully built up this massive amount of weight around me, as a wall to shield myself from pain. In particular, a wall to shield me from people. I complain that I do not have the confidence to socialise due to my insecurities about my weight, yet I also do not want to socialise, if I am completely honest, due to a far deeper fear that things which have happened in the past will reoccur. Friends abandoning me when they see me acting in ways that are ‘not like myself’, romantic relationships going horribly wrong, and even, if I’m completely honest, the prospect that hypersexuality will once again set in. The worst period of my entire life happened when I was suffering from hypersexuality. It destroyed everything I had. It left me a rock bottom. It is the one thing about mania that absolutely terrifies me. But, if I stay so overweight, I need not fear; nobody would want me anyway.

This is a terrible thought for all kinds of reasons, but there it is. Similar to this is the thought of living alone. I’ve lived alone before, and it didn’t end well. I lost my job, found another, lost that too, found another, but still was unable to keep up rent and bill payments due to my excessive overspending and total inability to budget. The thought of that happening again, after I have spent the last two years trying to unravel the financial mess I was in, is terrifying, as is the thought of finally getting a place of my own and then losing it, is heartbreaking.

Better not to try than try and fail.

I have been wrestling with this for some weeks now. The diet which initially went so well and saw me lose over a stone hit a stall when I realised I’d lost twenty pounds and I might actually succeed. I regained five of those pounds almost overnight. I thankfully managed to recognise what I was doing and prevent the re-gain from becoming worse, but for two weeks it was all I could do to maintain my weight, there was no hope of me losing any. At the same time while everything appeared to be falling into place with my new business, and the prospect of moving out became a solid reality, within the next few months, I began to question everything, from whether or not I could cope with the business, to whether or not I should accept the Start Up loan I was offered to help me with it, to whether I should even be thinking of moving out at all, or if it weren’t better off staying with my mother.

It was the latter thought that finally broke through to me. Much as I love my mum, I do not love living with her. I have no independence. She drives me round the bend. Clearly, I wasn’t thinking rationally.

I am pleased to report that, with all this in mind, I have managed to lose just over four pounds this week. I am still afraid of what will happen if I ever do manage to get back to a state in which I feel comfortable socialising, however I am more afraid of spending the rest of my life alone and miserable. Things with my business are moving forwards, and while I’m still struggling to manage my own personal budget well enough to feel confident in living alone, I have improved considerably.

The next challenge to tackle is my PhD.

The one thing that has hit me with crystal clarity as a result of all this is that I have avoided it. I do everything I can in order to get out of working on it, because I am terrified of finishing it. I no longer feel I am capable of working in an academic setting, so much so that I didn’t even last the first year of my Scholarship living in Bangor. I took myself away from it. My former dreams of working at a University when I finish have vanished as a result. I do not feel I could possibly cope, therefore I do not want to finish my thesis, as this would mean I was expected to DO something with the qualification.

Hopefully, this realisation in itself will now aid me in getting on with it.