light box – The Daily Opinion

Runner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But fuck me it was exhausting.

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

In my life before I have never felt that tired.

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

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

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

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

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.