triggers – The Daily Opinion

Moving On

My sister is currently in the process of moving house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We are, all, moving on.

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

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

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

I couldn’t face it.

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

He was in Macclesfield hospital.

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

It’s meaningless.

So I tell myself.

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

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

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

I am, it would seem, also moving on.

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

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.