After last night’s abrupt descent into the depressive abyss…I slept. I only woke up a couple of times, which is an improvement. But I think weeks of waking five, six times every night…May have brought on exhaustion and kept me asleep. Maybe if I just survive weeks on end on minimal sleep I can get the occasional good night’s sleep.
Somehow, that reasoning seems flawed.
Everyone thinks it’s so simple. If you can’t sleep, take a pill. Well, the ones the shrinks give me are coma inducers that pretty much guarantee a hangover the next day and render me useless dead weight.
The over the counter stuff doesn’t work.
And it’s too easy to become reliant on a quick sleep fix. I’d rather tough it out, but I think last night proved…We all hit a crash and burn point of exhaustion.
This morning…It was so cold, I hit snooze until ten after seven. I didn’t want to leave the warm blankets. But I did. While my kid got ready, we checked out some metal versions these guys on youtube do of pop songs. Must admit…The metal version of the Frozen theme my kid has held me hostage to for the last year…done metal…is not too putrid. Metal makes everything better. And the new Marilyn Manson…Absolutely rocks the casbah, it’s like he’s gone back to the original metal rather than the trancy pop stuff they did for awhile. And my kid is learning all the words to “Deep Six” because I have been exhausting myself on it.
Which means…I am mentally hypomanic. Gotta love the stability (ha) of cyclothymia. For months I have been very leery of music because it heightened my anxiety and I couldn’t enjoy it. Now I am enjoying it a bit and my mind is a funnel cloud of activity, both good and bad…Yes, manic.
It’s just a different kind of manic compared to solid bipolar one and two. I will run high for a few hours then bottom out. The patterns remain fairly consistent in their inconsistency.
Due to all the anti mental illness propaganda I have read this week (not by choice, it just seems to be there at every turn) I have looked back on old journals. I am talking six, ten years ago journals. Trying to identify what I might be doing to sabotage my own progress. If any personality quirks or habits contribute. Maybe it’s all emotional damage.
I can’t find anything.
If anything, the personality issues that so plagued me have really dissipated to a quiet background noise. Recently R’s wife said, “At your age, you’re not going to change much, you are who you are now.” And that irked me because I am constantly involving, improving as a person. Who I was just six years ago is drastically different today, in outlook, in determination, in a willingness to fight for my own evolution as a person.
What has not changed are the constant cycles with the cyclothymia, depressions, and anxiety. I found a journal entry from when my grandfather died. I was manic and people thought I was happy he was dead. Which was the furthest thing from the truth, but how you behave on the outside is how people base their opinion.
Then there was an entry from 2008 where everything was going well, I pretty much felt stable and there was less stress…And I babbled on and on about the futility of life and how it felt like I had a ship anchor weighing me down every day.
Outside triggers seem to mean nothing with this disorder.It can definitely contribute to the anxiety, but as far as the moods go…It’s whiplash.
Yesterday, I was kind of down and of course, the bug crawling on my skin anxiety was in full force. R asked me to do him one favor and it totally escaped my memory…He got irked and said, “I asked you to do one thing and you couldn’t even get it right, moron.”
Most people would get angry or sad that a friend would say such a thing.
It’s so common in my life, it slid right off my surface.
Because I know I can be a flake. It’s not by choice. I don’t make an effort to be ditzy or forgetful. Most days, I feel like my brain is tapioca. I forget things ten seconds after they are said (mostly with numbers.) I seem to have some sort of numerical dyslexia where even as the numbers are recited or written, I get them garbled. I sometimes garble my sentences and say or write the opposite of what was meant.
I will agree to do something Monday on Friday, then Friday comes and I am a basketcase so once again, I am letting people down.
I accept my flakiness. I don’t like it, and I try hard to fight it…But it doesn’t change a thing.
Sometimes I think that Nardil interaction that landed me in the hospital gave me brain damage.
Other times, I wonder if it’s not all the psych drugs that turned my brain into scrambled eggs.
Psychological whiplash. Yeah, that’s pretty apt a description.
I am still here, still trying. Even if it seems like I am getting nowhere. And I partially blame my doctors. They are so busy being conservative, I don’t feel I get proper treatment in the five minute med checks. I am supposed to fill it in with counseling but honestly, after 20 years of it…Most of my major issues have been hashed out.
Except the bipolar, anxiety, and seasonal affect and there is not a thing a therapist can do for that.
It’s medical and for that, I need adequate mental care.
Unfortunately, I am forced to go where the insurance will pay.
For weeks (months even) I have toyed with the idea of puffing myself up with courage to go to the psych doc and lay it all on the line. How I feel I am not receiving the best treatment and how his dismissal of my worst problems is a hindrance and a disservice. I am trying so hard and still…
Feeling helpless and at the mercy of others is not something that sits well with me.
They say take charge of your own care.
I try. But I can only do so much with doctors who don’t want to venture outside their own comfort zone as far as treatment goes. And I am expected to defer to their expertise when in fact, the only one who is an expert on my illness is me. I live with it 24-7-365.
Funny how living it doesn’t qualify you as having an expert opinion.
Now…my stomach is twisted in knots and my brain is racing and I need to go find one of those funky collars they give whiplash victims. Do they make those for the mind? And if so, I really hope it’ available in black.
Yeah, sarcastic humor.
I must be cured.
Except I haven’t bathed in two days, skipped a bra, can’t be bothered to feed myself, and can’t even work on my vampire novel because my brain is speeding too fast.
One step forward, two steps back.
I babble therefore I am.
