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.
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.
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 6th, 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.
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.
In the opening post for this new column, I mentioned a list of goals, scribbled on a receipt in Costa. While The Great Epiphany helped to clear a lot of the negativity from my outlook it did not, in itself, provide me with any concrete plans for achieving the things on that list. There are two vying for dominance at the moment, losing the weight I have gained as a result of my bipolar, and the MEDs I now take to treat it, and the desperate need to move out of my mother’s house (much as I appreciate her taking me in) and regain my independence.
The latter is something that now comes down to my financial situation, which is a work in (very slow) progress. The former however was something that I started working on the very same day I had The Great Epiphany. That was almost two months ago. On that day, I weighed 20 stone and 8 pounds (288lbs), the heaviest I have ever been in my life. Since then, I have successfully lost fifteen pounds, just over a stone. Of the eleven stone I had to lose, I’m one down.
That, in itself, already feels like an achievement, however it is tainted by the fact that I know I have managed to do this before—one of my recurring patterns is losing a stone or two in weight when I am feeling well, then regaining it, plus a little extra, the next time I have a bout of depression. For some reason however, it feels different this time, and I believe this to be a direct result of The Great Epiphany.
In essence, what TGE made me see was that it was okay if I didn’t drop ten stone in a month or two. While this may seem an obvious point, for me it isn’t something that comes naturally. I have always had an unhealthy relationship with food, having suffered from bulimia throughout my teens and early twenties, and retained the binge-eating habits that went with that even though I have ‘recovered’. I use inverted commas there because a person never truly recovers from an eating disorder; they learn to manage it, but the patterns are always within them and can, at any point, return. I’ve had several relapses since, and I certainly retain the tendency to binge terribly when I’m upset or stressed. As a result, I am accustomed to yo-yo dieting, rapidly losing or gaining large amounts of weight. At one point I lost five stone in less than six weeks. As a result, it’s difficult for me to accept the notion of slow weight loss, especially when I have so much weight to lose.
In recent years, as my bipolar cycles have flipped from being predominantly manic to being predominantly depressive, my weight has steadily gone up. While I continue to have spurts of rapid weight loss while manic, the amount I lose has grown steadily less, is never permanent, and I struggle to prevent additional weight going on when I flip back the other way. Due to my MEDs, my periods of mania are now getting fewer and further between, and my capacity to lose weight the rest of the time is virtually nonexistent.
I take high doses of Depakote and Quitiapine, the former being a mood stabaliser, the latter an anti-psychotic. The result is that my metabolism is through the floor, and even sticking to 1200 calories a day, and exercising, I struggle to lose more than a couple of ounces a week. This, for me, is far too little reward for the amount of energy and effort it takes. It leaves me too disheartened to stick to it. In addition, it is simply not enough to compensate for the times when I’m too depressed to maintain my diet, and the weight keeps piling on.
TGE forced me to look at the long game, rather than the short term. I am a very impatient person, and often give up on things if they do not immediately go my way. I had already been discussing my weight issues at length with my doctor by the time of TGE. At my request, they had put me on a weight loss medication named Xenical. You may have seen this advertised as Alli, at the extortionate price of around £40 for a four week supply. It is the same thing, a blue capsule taken with each meal, three times a day, that absorbs roughly 1/3 of the fat you ingest. In theory, if you lose two pounds on your own, you will lose an extra pound if taking Xenical. Should you consider going onto this medication, I strongly urge you to do it through your GP. Firstly, because they will monitor you properly and give you extra advice about a diet and exercise plan that is right for you, individually, secondly because, as long as you actually are over weight, they will give it to you on monitored prescription. This means a month supply for £7.85, rather than £40. If, like me, you get a pre-paid prescription card, it is even less.
I’ll discuss the benefits and downsides of this medication in a later post, but for now suffice to say that this is not a magic bullet. It is not a wonderful fat melting pill that allows you to eat whatever you want and still lose weight. It requires a strict, low fat, calorie controlled diet, comprising a lot of fruit and vegetables, and plenty of exercise. In short, you still have to stick to a diet as difficult as any other in order for it to work.
This small fact is the reason why many people say it doesn’t work; they don’t stick to a diet while taking it, and blame their failure to lose weight on the medication which clearly ‘doesn’t work’, and complain about the side effects which are quite unpleasant if you’re taking this and NOT sticking to an appropriate diet.
I fell victim to this myself when I first started out on it. I stuck to the diet, I took the pills, and after a fortnight I’d lost half a stone, far more than I’d have managed on my own. I was elated. Then the inevitable happened: I hit a dip. Those seven pounds went back on, and brought an additional two friends along with them. Because I was still taking the new MEDs but no longer sticking to the diet, I experience extreme side effects and had to stop taking them. I was so demoralised I gave up on both the pills and the diet I had been sticking to fairly well before I started the pills. They had, it seemed, done more damage than good.
A couple of weeks later, feeling slightly better, I started again. Again I lost about half a stone and again it went back on again. Round and round I went, until TGE made me stop and reconsider the problem.
I was barely losing weight on my own, however with the aid of the tablets I was able to lose quite well, as long as I stuck to the diet. The issue seemed to be that my mood was only good enough to allow me to stick to the diet for a couple of weeks at a time, while the depression in between ‘good’ phases was long enough to pile on more than the weight I had lost. My weight was still going up, yet even I could acknowledge that it was only going up by a few pounds, every few months, where before it had been going up by a stone or more every few months.
If nothing else, my efforts were preventing my weight spiraling even further out of control.
Encouraged by this thought, I once again started taking the tablets and sticking to the diet. I bought a new notebook and started recording everything I ate and drank, both on My Fitness Pal, and in the notebook. I made notes on how I felt each day. I did as much exercise as I could manage, and I concentrated, initially, on just managing to stick to the diet for three weeks. In the past, I’d never managed more than two weeks at a time. Three weeks, I thought, and I’ll have lost more than half a stone.
Three weeks passed, and I was nine pounds down. Pleased with myself, I managed another week before my mood dipped and I hit a bad spell. The carb cravings hit and I was back to eating cake and crisps and huge portions of pasta. However, I continued to track what I was eating, despite it being beyond my diet, and I found that the period I was binging for didn’t last nearly as long, and by the end of it I had only regained two pounds. Overall I had still lost half a stone.
This had never happened before.
Something which TGE helped me to understand is this: I am going to have good weeks and bad weeks. There will be days when I step on the scales and I’ve lost, and days when I step on and have gained. Whichever way it goes, it doesn’t really matter, the important thing is that I keep trying to manage my weight and to improve my health and fitness. I watch as the number of pounds I have lost slowly but surely increases, and I find myself reassured in the knowledge that, the next time I have a blip, it’s unlikely any weight gain will exceed that which I’ve now managed to lose. The more I lose, the more this thought solidifies, to the point that I now feel comfortable enough to disclose my journey so far, and state that I feel reasonably confident in my ability to continue to lose the weight, albeit at a much slower pace than I would ideally like.Three weeks have passed since I got myself back on track. I’ve lost another eight pounds and have continued with my routine of My Fitness Pal, journal, pills and note taking. I’m trying to pay as much attention to what I eat as I can, and get myself into the habit of eating as healthily as possible.
I am no longer expecting to lose each and every week; I have accepted that there will be times when I don’t, and times when I gain, depending on the cycle of my moods and other far more normal concerns like holidays and meals out. The difference now is that I have myself in a place where, when I hit a blip, I can simply acknowledge it as a blip and move on. It doesn’t become a complete failure. It doesn’t push me further into a depressive state and make me think I’ll never succeed so there’s no point in trying. It doesn’t actually make the situation worse.
Setting myself a more manageable goal—sticking to my diet for three weeks—proved to be very successful. The thought of losing only two pounds a week is incredibly demoralising for me, as that means it would take a year and a half to lose the weight I need to shift. The fact that it’s unlikely I’d lose two pounds every week means it would take even longer. Realistically, it’s likely to take two years to lose the weight I want to drop. That feels like a very long time. It seems impossible that I would be able to stick to a diet for that long. However, sticking to it for three weeks is manageable. The thought doesn’t terrify me, and ultimately I managed four, a whole week extra.
Similarly, the thought of losing eleven stone was completely overwhelming. However, having lost one, I can see that this—losing one stone—is an achievable goal. I am no longer focusing on how many I have left to lose, but simply on losing one more. I can do that, I know I can, because I already did.
On July 11th this year, I was 288lbs. I am now 273.4.
Stick to the diet for one week longer than you managed last time.
Walk with Dexter (my dog) for an extra ten minutes each day.
Lose one stone.
These are manageable goals that I have set myself, and achieved, with relative ease. All of them contribute to my overall goal, but none of them are overwhelming, none crippling in the fear they produce.
In July of this year, two extraordinary things happened in very quick succession.
July 11th 2013
I turned twenty-eight, and for the first time in as long as I can remember, I enjoyed my birthday. The smiles were not faked for the sake of everyone who expected me to be happy. I didn’t get drunk as quickly as possible, in order to get me through the day. I didn’t lie awake at the end of it all, crying silently at the wall, as the night slowly passed by and edged towards morning, the dawn of another year through which I had no inclination to live.
Birthdays are always tough for me. I’m unsure exactly why. Perhaps it is the realisation that yet another year has passed, and still I don’t feel ‘better’, still my life is not how I wish it to be, still I am not ‘happy’. Perhaps it is simply due to my seasonally cycling Bipolar Disorder and certain memory-triggers at that time of year.
I’ve given a great deal of consideration to what it means to be ‘happy’ in recent months, but I shall save those musings for a future post. For now, I want to explain what happened in July, and how it led to the resurrection of this blog.
I’m not completely sure what was different about my birthday this year: perhaps it’s that I finally have a good balance in my MEDs and am actually taking them properly; perhaps it was the fact I’d decided we must have a joint celebration for my niece, whose half birthday was two days before my own, and actual birthday is so close to Christmas I feel she deserves another; perhaps it was simply that I was turning twenty-eight and, being as I am, a little psychotic when it comes to odd numbers, the fact I had a two and an eight in one year (my two favourite numbers), both of which add up to ten (another very good one), made me feel a better about the whole thing from the outset.
Whatever the reason, the decision was made to go to Chester Zoo, as my niece (much like myself) is obsessed with penguins. This pleases me greatly. She is already showing, at six months old, many sensible characteristics, several of which are shared with me. She is, I feel, progressing nicely.
She is also a turning point in my life, for reasons so complex I can barely find the words to express them properly. For years, I have carried certain burdens, certain ghosts, one of which is a miscarriage I suffered years ago that has quite literally haunted me ever since, and is one of the memory-triggers to which I earlier referred. It happened in June, at the end of my first year at University, and for whatever reason, every June that has passed since then, I have relived the event, as if it had just happened. I have been stuck, mired in the memory of a child I never even knew, a life that had barely even begun to form, for it was so early on when it happened I wasn’t even been aware of it until after the fact. I have never understood why this affected me as much as it did. I think it has a lot to do with my deep seated need for a stable family environment, something which—unbeknown to most of my family—I hadn’t had for many years by that point.
My niece changed everything.
When I first found out my sister was pregnant I was at once delighted and consumed by grief and outrage. I vacillated between a compulsive need to do for her the things I had imaged, a thousand times, doing during my own pregnancy, and an inability to speak to her for fear of crying or screaming at her and, consequently, causing her upset. The turning point came when she developed problems during her pregnancy, not uncommon, but severe enough that she needed regular help, couldn’t walk without the aid of crutches, and, for the final three months, a wheelchair. The all-consuming obsession with my own memory was utterly obliterated out by the over-riding need to take care of my sister and her unborn child. I no longer cared about myself, what I was feeling wasn’t important; they were memories, they were past, this was happening now.
I was terrified that, once the baby was born, I would go back to how I had felt before, that I’d find it difficult to connect with her baby, that I’d resent my sister, for having what I didn’t. Instead, the most bizarre thing happened.
I completely fell in love with the child. I was utterly besotted. And, more confounding still, I found I was no longer clinging to that memory. The anniversary of the miscarriage came and went this year with comparatively little in the way of reaction. I had slightly higher anxiety levels than usual, but we had anticipated this reaction, and my psychiatrist had given me additional MEDs to combat it, a step which worked like the proverbial charm. And so it was that I reached my twenty-eighth birthday, a point in the year that is usually my second worst, feeling very good.
The fact that I had broken what I thought to be an unbreakable pattern was something of a revelation.
The second peculiar thing to happen in July was one of those incidents which, to anyone else, would have seemed so mundane you would think me crazy to say it was such a defining moment in my life. I have often found however, that the greatest insights come from the most trivial of situations.
It was not long after my successful birthday trip to the zoo. I was sitting in WHSmiths in Chester, at a table in Costa overlooking the street below. I love Chester. It’s a beautiful city, not to mention one of my favourite shopping destinations. I was idly reading a book, but mostly looking out of the window and watching the passage of life beneath the window. People watching is a hobby of mine. I try to figure out what makes the rest of the world tick, what it is that allows them to do all the things I can’t seem to manage, and often do them with ease.
On the street below I noticed a cute little mosha girl. I could tell she was cute, even though her back was to me, and there was something very familiar about her. She was skinny but with a decent set of hips, swamped by a black hoody, and maroon cords flared so wide they swallowed her feet, trailing the pavement. She had long, straight, dirty-blonde hair, and as I stared at her I realised she could be me, aged eighteen or so, back when I still thought—at least occasionally—that the world could be mine; when I believed, wholeheartedly, that by the age of twenty-eight I’d have my shit together.
I stare at the girl and remember being her; the confidence, the friends I’d had, the way the bipolar (then un-diagnosed) only reared its ugly head occasionally, and the damage was relatively minimal, compared to the havoc it would wreak in my twenties. I recall with perfect clarity what it was to be in love for the first time and never question how that would play out: together forever, marriage, a house, a child eventually.
Barely a year later, all these things were stolen from me. I was never the same after the miscarriage, perhaps due to the changing hormone levels in my body as a result. The cycling of my moods became permanent, pronounced and rapid. I had no idea what was happening to me and neither did anyone else in my life. Those who loved me most stuck around, bewildered, but always there, even if only on the sidelines while I tried to figure it out, but as the years passed and I became ever stranger to them, they seemed to lose hope I’d ever go back to being that girl again, the girl who was standing beneath me as my latte cooled in my hands.
After that I lost almost everyone and everything I cared about. For the most part these losses were permanent. Those who remained in my life seemed so far away I could never touch them, never reach them, and certainly could never explain what had happened to me. My decisions went from bad to worse, and somehow, through it all, I was eventually diagnosed and began treatments, MEDSs and therapy. The first real turn came, ironically, when my house burned down at the end of 2011, and I was forced to move back in with my mother (more on that later). The second and infinitely sharper turn came this July, as I sat at that table in Costa and tried to puzzle out what I was feeling, as I stared at that girl.
I was sad.
Not in the usual, desolate, soul destroying way to which I’ve become accustomed, but in the transient way that everyone feels at various points in their life, when they are confronted by something unpleasant. Ironically, the fact that I was feeling sad in the ‘normal’ manner pleased me, because I had the distinct sense that it would pass. It wasn’t permanent. It wasn’t going to keep me awake for weeks, or months, wasn’t going to prevent me from functioning like your average person does. It was a sadness from which I would recover.
I was sad for the girl I used to be; the girl who could be standing on the street beneath me, as I stare out of the window. She had so many hopes, and so many dreams, and I have accomplished none of them. I am, in fact, stalled in a situation she would find utterly abhorrent: I am overweight (at that point eleven stone overweight), unemployed, struggling to finish the latest draft of my novel, struggling to finish my thesis, single, lacking any form of social life that doesn’t involve Facebook, broke, and, as the cherry topping the multi-tiered cake of despair, living with my mother.
The latter point alone would have been enough to send my younger self completely over the edge.
It was then that I realise something that had been blindingly apparent for a while: it’s time to change.
It’s time to change everything.
And this is The Great Epiphany that has led me to the point I am at today. It may seem ridiculous: surely everyone who is even remotely unhappy with their lives must think this on a regular basis. It is, however, one thing to say it’s time to change, even to realise it’s time to change, to want, desperately, more than anything else in the world, to change, and another entirely to actually do it.
Change, is bad. Change, is scary. Change is exceedingly difficult to accomplish in any true form.
Not only that, but there are so many things that need changing. It isn’t just one, incredibly difficult thing I have to achieve. In my imagination I see an infinite string of impossible to achieve goals, all of which alone are enough to cripple me. This string has tied me down. It has me bound so tightly I can’t even breathe. And yet, there is this girl on the pavement below me, and she is constrained by none of these things.
She is free.
I wish to be free too, and suddenly that wish, that desire to achieve these goals seems like the most important thing. Maybe it doesn’t matter if I never have everything I want in life; maybe the only thing that matters is that I continue to try, no matter how impossible things may seem. In the past when I’ve decided I’ll lose the weight, I’ll find the perfect job, I’ll get my novel published, I’ll find a new place to live, I have felt like an utter failure because, a few weeks or a few months later, the scales are telling me an even higher number, I’m still signing on at the job centre once a fortnight, every time I try and finish the new draft of the novel, something distracts me, and I haven’t managed to save so much as a penny towards a deposit on a new flat. I become despondent, I feel I will never succeed at anything and, more often than not, I stop trying.
Trying, however, is the important thing. Success is great, achieving your goals is admirable, but it is also something that people spend a lifetime doing; they don’t obtain everything they want in a few weeks, or even a few months.
I want my life to change, therefore I must try to change it, and i must keep trying, no matter how many times I have failed in the past, no matter how many set backs I encounter in the future.
It is at this point that I begin to hear Dory from Finding Nemo chanting ‘Just keep swimming, just keep swimming’, and the image looms in my mind of a giant shark.
In this metaphor, Bruce the shark is playing the part of my my failures, past and present, lurking behind me, and looming ahead. This is a particularly poignant image for me, as I have a pathological fear of sharks (seriously, even cartoon sharks scare the crap out of me).
Dory, however, has a point. My efforts and how successful they are will not be measured by how quickly I reach each goal, how many goals I cross off my list, or even if I reach them at all, but by the fact that I continue to try to change those things in my life I do not like, and that I am, as a result, as happy as I can be in the moment.
I spend a great deal of time thinking ‘I’d be so much happier if …’ that I almost always forget to think ‘I am actually happy right now because …’
It occurs to me that perhaps I am never happy because I am consumed by the pursuit of happiness, something which I have convinced myself I will only feel if I achieve all these apparently unattainable goals.
And so I made a decision: to no longer wait until I have achieved everything before I feel happy; to allow myself to pursue my goals at a reasonable pace, rather than expecting them to come to fruition immediately, then abandoning them when they don’t; to continue to try to improve those thing in my life with which I am patently unhappy; and, perhaps most importantly, to be realistic about the fact that, because I am bipolar, my approach to these goals and problems may have to be a little different.
My mistake, in the past, is setting out to change something while feeling well, then finding I am unable to continue, or at least less capable of continuing, during periods of illness. It is easy to allow these times to make you think you cannot achieve your goals, you cannot make changes, you cannot ever be happy, because you are bipolar. But bipolar is not an excuse to never achieve, to never try, to never be happy, nor is it something that is ever going to simply go away. It is simply an extra obstacle (albeit a very large and complex one) to navigate; for each of the things I want to achieve I must find a way that accommodates my bipolar. It is a matter of accepting the fact that my progress in all endeavours will—much like my mood—suffer from peaks and dips. I need to learn to anticipate these as much as possible, and build mechanisms into my approaches that accommodates them, so they do as little damage to my overall efforts as possible.
As I sit in Costa, musing on just how to accomplish this, I blink, and the girl in the street is gone.
In all likelihood she simply moved on. However, being as I am of a certain mindset, I like to think that, for one instant, two points in space and time that should never have touched, pressed together, so that I might be granted The Great Epiphany I so desperately needed.
On the back of my Costa receipt I scribble a list.
I use the list as a bookmark, and transfer it, as I finish one book and begin another, finish that and start another, so that I don’t forget what I saw and what it made me realise.
That very day I begin to go about changing the things in my life I do not like.
It isn’t easy. Nothing dramatic happens over night. I don’t suddenly drop four dress sizes, loose all my social anxieties and stumble upon a dream job with outrageous pay, which allows me to move into a little cottage with roses over the door and a ridiculously attractive neighbour who, as it turns out, happens to be the love of my life; this isn’t a Sophie Kinsella novel.
No, as I write this I am still, to all intents and purposes, in the same place I was two months ago. I am still overweight (at this point ten stone), still struggling to finish my thesis, still single, still lacking any form of social life that doesn’t involve Facebook, still broke, and, as the cherry topping the multi-layered cake of despair, still living with my mother.
And yet, I have finished the latest draft of my novel and sent it safely back to my agent, and no longer unemployed, but self-employed as a freelance writer, editor, proofreader and artist, with a sideline in publishing. My first book was released last Saturday (31st August 2013), and although it is an edited art volume rather than a novel, I am incredibly proud of it.
The resurrection of this blog came about as I realised two things: firstly, my online network of friends is one of the very positive things about my life, and I wanted to give something back (even if it is only material for them to use in relentlessly mocking me); secondly, and to my pleasant surprise, I am finding that some of my strategies are actually working well. As such, I want to keep a record of them, one that other people, in similar situations to me, might use. One of the worst aspects of bipolar disorder—and I imagine most other mental health conditions—is the loneliness. The feeling that you are completely alone, that there isn’t a single other person alive who has felt the way you do, and so you have nobody to advise you as to how to go about making yourself feel better.
I have felt this way often. When I was first diagnosed, it was a permanent, insidious presence in my mind, this thought that I was utterly alone. I read book after book about bipolar, and depression, even schizophrenia and psychiatry in general. Nothing helped. Everything was either written by people who were professionals discussing it clinically, or people describing their life events, but offering no true commentary on them, no real understanding of the why and the how and the WHY? No suggestions as to the cause of these incidents and how other might avoid such situations, no account of the way they have improved their own mental health since then.
The issues of ‘why do I feel this way?’, and perhaps more importantly ‘when will I stop feeling this way?’ are questions which still, for me, lack answers. Certainly medication has helped. Some of my more recent interventions seem to be beneficial also. As a result, I felt it important to share my thoughts, silly as they may be, in the hope that others suffering from that crippling sense of loneliness might know that they are not, as they fear, completely alone.
I intend to share with you my research into bipolar, my thoughts, my personal experiences and my experiments with various treatments and methods. I hope along the way to get closer to achieving my own goals. At the very least, I hope the expectation of weekly posts forces me to do the one thing The Great Epiphany showed me was most important:
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.
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.
TGE forced me to look at the long game, rather than the short term. I am a very impatient person, and often give up on things if they do not immediately go my way. I had already been discussing my weight issues at length with my doctor by the time of TGE. At my request, they had put me on a weight loss medication named Xenical. You may have seen this advertised as 
Stick to the diet for one week longer than you managed last time.
It was not long after my successful birthday trip to the zoo. I was sitting in WHSmiths in Chester, at a table in Costa overlooking the street below. I love Chester. It’s a beautiful city, not to mention one of my favourite shopping destinations. I was idly reading a book, but mostly looking out of the window and watching the passage of life beneath the window. People watching is a hobby of mine. I try to figure out what makes the rest of the world tick, what it is that allows them to do all the things I can’t seem to manage, and often do them with ease.
I want my life to change, therefore I must try to change it, and i must keep trying, no matter how many times I have failed in the past, no matter how many set backs I encounter in the future.
In all likelihood she simply moved on. However, being as I am of a certain mindset, I like to think that, for one instant, two points in space and time that should never have touched, pressed together, so that I might be granted The Great Epiphany I so desperately needed.