Science & Health – Page 2 – The Daily Opinion

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.

The Phoenix

On October 20^th 2011 my fiancé took it upon himself to burn down our home. I was inside at the time, along with our three dogs. The day after, The Chester Chronicle reported the incident:

http://www.chesterchronicle.co.uk/news/chester-cheshire-news/firefighters-battled-blaze-ripped-through-5187729

Two years later, I find it utterly bizarre to read this, to recall that night, and what it felt like running back in through the smoke, after I’d already got out with Dexter, to get Scruffy and Stout, the two dogs that remained inside, trapped upstairs and terrified. I read the words, and I know I was one of the people put in the back of an ambulance, oxygen mask forced over my mouth, and told over and over again ‘just breath normally’.

How do you breath normally when your life is going up in flames?

What is the normal method of breathing through such an event?

I remember very little of the immediate aftermath. I know I stayed with my brother for a few days. I recall I had bright pink hair at the time, because my mum sent me to the hairdressers two weeks later to have it dyed a ‘normal’ colour; my Nanny had passed away, and I couldn’t go to her funeral with pink hair.

I had them dye it black.

I recall her funeral with perfect clarity, watching her coffin drop into the ground, and thinking she would smile at the irony, for the gerbera I dropped in on top of her were the exact shade of pink my hair had been, not two days previously.

Shortly after that I broke up with my fiancé. This was, in hindsight, something I had been wanting to do for a very long time but felt utterly incapable of managing. For the most part this was due to the fact I felt unable to cope alone. I was terrified of being by myself, something I now know was due to the extended periods of acute depression I was suffering at the time. From a practical perspective, I couldn’t afford to leave, I had nowhere to go and no means of funding a new flat, having given my own up when I moved in with him. This again, was in large part due to my bipolar and the horrendous spending sprees I had been on while manic. From a purely emotional standpoint, I was prevented from leaving long before the fire forced me to go, when he was diagnosed with cancer. By that point I had already realised it was an extremely unhealthy relationship, that he couldn’t be trusted in anything, and that the only thing I wanted to do was leave. Unfortunately, I was penned in. I had no money, I had nowehere to go, I wasn’t well enough to be on my own and, now, I felt it would make me an unbelievably terrible person if I left. He had cancer. How do you leave a person who has cancer? It doesn’t matter how badly they treat you, they have cancer, and everything seems to come back to that.

The situation became so bad I tried (once again) to kill myself and, that time, I very nearly succeeded.

I was afraid of doing the one thing that would actually have allowed me to extricate myself from that situation: moving back in with my mother.

The fire forced that decision upon me. I quite literally had no choice, as my brother was unable to house me permanently. Once I was there, the thought of ever going back to him was simply absurd. Months later, I would come to terms with the reasons I had ended up with him in the first place, but in the immediate aftermath of the fire, I was too numb to think.

That was the worst time of my life. I was fortunate it was winter and everyone expected me to wear long sleeves, for my arms were covered in burns, a nasty habit I have when thoughts and emotions over-run my head. You can still see the scars. Most of them are a livid white, others are now fading.

By Christmas I was on strong medication for the first time, and adjusting to that was an ordeal in itself. For the most part, the MEDs made me sleep. That is, I think, all I remember about the first half of 2012, the persistent need to sleep. Even when I was awake, I was barely with it. I did nothing but watch DVD box sets, since I couldn’t abide silence, and I couldn’t muster the impetuous or energy to do anything else.

Thanks to the cyclic nature of my condition there was the odd week or two when I flipped the other way. These times were no better. In many ways, they were worse. I went on outrageous spending sprees with money I didn’t have. I worked endlessly on my novel without sleeping or eating for days, sometimes weeks at a time, a total contrast to my previous state.

It has been a long, incredibly slow, unbelievably hard road from there to here, and still I have days when I feel nothing is going right in my life. Still I have the knowledge that I’m in terrible debt, unable to move out, struggling to manage my bipolar, but these things are no longer as impossible to deal with as they once were. Thanks to a debt management plan I am slowly sorting my financial situation out. Now that I am actually employed I am beginning to see the potential to move out some time in the relatively near future. And while my bipolar is by no means ‘better’, I do have a much better handle on it than I did two years ago.

I’ve not had to cover burns for a long time now.

This is an irony that hasn’t escaped me, the fact my chosen form of self harm has—since I was a teenager—been burning. It’s a slightly odd one, different to the majority who tend to cut. I never actually considered why I chose burning over cutting, I’m fairly certain it wasn’t a conscious decision I ever made. Yet here I am, fifteen years later, burn scars on my arms and abdomen and the majority of those possessions remaining to me ruined by fire.

The fire.

I used to think of the fire was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It had left me homeless, ruined everything I owned, forced me to do what was perhaps the one thing I feared most in life—moving back in with my mother—and it had left me feeling even more alone than ever.

With my life quite literally in ashes and no choice but to place myself in my mother’s care, I ended up doing the one thing that actually enabled me to overcome the most difficult obstacles I faced at that point in my life. I left my fiancé and by so doing a relationship that was more unhealthy for me than anything else I have been through, and that’s saying a lot. It saddens me to think that, were it not for my bipolar, there is no way I would ever have ended up with that man, no way I would ever have stayed with that man as long as I did, no way I would ever have allowed that man to treat me the way that he did. it terrifies me to think that, due to my bipolar and his cancer, I would in all likelihood still be with him now, stuck there, unable to move forwards with my life, unable to get any better. The alternative, is that I would finally have succeeded in killing myself.

After the fire I was living with someone responsible, able to monitor me and ensure I was reasonably okay. I began regular counselling and therapy, got on to proper MEDs and, eventually, plucked up the courage to tell my CPN that the psychiatrist I was seeing was not right for me at all. I asked to see someone new, who suggested a whole different course of treatment and, since then, my recovery has been coming on in leaps and bounds, and while that may be interspersed with periods of inactivity and depression, there has been nothing as extreme as that which I was experiencing in 2008 to 2011. My thesis is now edging closer to completion, and my novel has an agent and has been re-drafted into something of which I am truly, very proud. Add to this my other ventures and you begin to see that none of these things would have been possible were it not for one, single, defining moment in my life, when everything was scorched clean and there was nothing left but the potential for new growth.

I used to think the fire ruined my life.

Now I think it saved it.

Autumn Showers …

One of the worst and perhaps least understood aspects of my condition is the recurring, and often debilitating, inability to perform everyday tasks. I recently read Marian Keyes’ The Mystery of Mercy Close and was very impressed with the way she laid her own experiences with depression bare. I did however feel that she sugar coated one aspect; the main character’s inability to maintain her personal hygiene. In the novel, Helen is very aware of how often she bathes and whether or not she has done so in the last twenty-four hours. When she hasn’t, she often relies upon people to press her into doing so. This is one area where my experience of depression does not match with Marian’s description.

I love showers. I find there is nothing better. Scorching water that’s just slightly too hot, that you leave running so long the whole room becomes a sauna; shower gels in a variety of flavours that leave your skin smelling and feeling great; shampoo, conditions, the feeling of freshly shaved legs against your pjs when you fall asleep at night. Taking a long shower is one of my favourite things to do, especially when I’m not in a good mood. Water washes away all manner of troubles.

You can imagine then how upsetting it is for me, to come back to my senses one day and discover, based on the state of my hair and the less than pleasant aroma emanating from my own body, that it has clearly been days since I last took a shower. Again.

This often happens when I am in my depressed cycles. It happened again today, when I realised that it was (to my shame) at least a week since I last took a shower. The very thought of this disgusts me and I find it a less than pleasant thing to admit to, however it fits with a pattern of behaviour I notice at times like this. For example, I also realised today that I neglected to post a blog last Sunday. I began writing it—a rather humorous anecdote about an ill-fated trip to Ikea for some new office furniture—but in the days between then and now I have somehow managed to forget to do it.

Showering is much the same. Unlike Helen, in Keyes’ novel, I am unaware for long stretches that I have forgotten to do common things like shower, eat, sleep, brush my teeth, leave the house, take my MEDs. The latter is particularly problematic, as failing to take my MEDs properly only makes everything worse. It is as if my mind crumbles and those parts that retain the information that tells me what I’m supposed to do in a day, are blowing away on the wind.

There are times when this condition of mine leaves me trapped in a loop. I sleep, I wake, I endure an indeterminate number of hours before once more falling asleep and repeating. What I do in my waking hours is extremely limited, firstly by my energy levels, which are almost non-existent, and secondly by the simple will to do things. I find it difficult at these times to do anything, even things I know to be very important, such as work, meeting deadlines, and keeping appointments.

I believe this is one of the hardest things for people who don’t suffer from any form of mental health illness to understand. It can appear to the outside observer to be laziness. I even berate myself on occasion for being ‘so lazy’, yet it is not always that I don’t wish to do things, but more that I find I can’t muster the impetous to do them even when I want to. Sometimes even when I desperately want to. It has taken me all day to manage to have a shower and write this (brief) post. Why? My mind is scattered. It is difficult to retain a thought for long enough to follow through on it, especially when it involves expending energy, which I have in very short supply.

People often try to ‘help’ when I’m like this, by insisting I ‘get out more’ or refuse to allow me my creature comforts (in my case DVDs) unless I get in the shower. Sometimes it works. Most often it just makes me feel worse.

The furniture I bought last week remains partially constructed in my office. The contents of my office are currently all over the house, making a terrible mess which is stressing me out no end. I can’t abide it. Yet I do not have the energy to finish putting that furniture together. I keep walking into the room, picking up a bit of shelf, staring at it vacantly for half and hour or so, then replacing it exactly where it was before and walking out again. As I recall, this happened once when I moved house. It took six months for me to unpack anything. I existed in a state of perpetual stress because every time I moved in my minuscule flat I fell over something, and yet I could not bring myself to do anything about it.

Since turning twenty-eight earlier this year I have found myself contemplating more and more the achievements I have made in life. As I approach thirty, I find I am deeply unsatisfied with what I have ‘achieved’. In fact, when I look back on where I was in my life ten years ago and compare it to now, I find that—with the exception of a University education I seem unable to complete at present—I have nothing to show for my time. I wonder how much more I would have to show for my time, had I not so often been hindered by this state of what I have come to see as ‘pause’. I feel as if someone has pressed a remote and paused me, while the rest of the world continues unobstructed. I still move, but so slowly that it is barely noticeable, so sluggishly that I am unable to think properly.

It took me all day today to have a shower, and write this post.

I count that as a win, it’s better than I’ve done for the last week, yet still it’s pathetic.

Here’s to better days, and managing to get more done.

Researchers Reveal Giant Glacier Melt Rate

As scientists try to establish a realistic prediction for how much sea levels can be expected to rise globally, a new set of results yielded from a new study in Antarctica have revealed how the continent’s longest glacier is being melted by the warm ocean flowing beneath it, at a rapid rate.

The Pine Island Glacier – measuring an impressive 31 miles long – has always been of great interest and eager scientists are finally able to monitor its behaviour more closely after the first successful research trip to the treacherous ice sheet.

Although it has been known since the end of the 1980s that the ice shelf is melting from beneath, its remote and tricky location had made it an impenetrable site. “In my 35 years doing fairly large oceanographic projects, the Pine Island Glacier one tops it in terms of its complexity and challenge,” said Professor Tim Stanton, the leader of the research team.

“But it’s clear that it’s very important to understand how these massive ice shelves are influenced by changes in the ocean. These observations will provide the basis for improving global climate models.”

An expedition in 2007 saw the first successful attempt to land on the Antarctic’s fastest flowing glacier, after determined efforts by the team to navigate the wind-whipped area. However, the trip ended in disappointment when logistical problems forced them to abandon their efforts for the much-needed research.

This was followed by a further attempt in 2011, which was thwarted by bad weather conditions. The team reached their location too late in the season and were left unable to carry out their investigations.

Finally in the December of 2012, the team of international scientists – including NASA and the British Antarctic Survey- finally embarked upon a fully-successful trip, installing the necessary instruments to generate the much longed-for results.

This trip was again repeated in January of 2013 and these long-anticipated expeditions created three new research camps which were set up in the centre of the glacier. Now finally, scientists have been able to establish specific measurements relating to its deterioration.

Drilling down into at least 450m of ice, using hot-water drills, the team installed a set of instruments below the shell. They were able to generate readings relating to both the speed and temperature of the water flowing beneath – measurements which previous satellite readings and airborne data had been unable to offer accurate results for.

The full paper, published in Science, describes the team’s studies and reveals just how severe the melting is. At some places, the rate is as high as 6 centimetres (2.36 inches) per day- equating to approximately 22 metres (72 feet) per year.

“What we have brought to the table are detailed measurements of melt rates that will allow simple physical models of the melting processes to be plugged into computer models of the coupled ocean/glacier system,” Stanton explained.

“These improved models are critical to our ability to predict future changes in the ice shelf, and glacier melt rates of the potentially unstable Western Antarctic Ice Sheet in response to changing ocean forces.”