A reflection on how mental illness has affected my life

The brush has claimed yet another clump of my rapidly thinning hair, I pull it from the knobbely pins and drop it in the waste basket. Taking a deep breath I look down over my skeletal frame briefly acknowledging the place where my breasts used to be. My skin has become a dry slightly greyish colour and the dark circles under my eyes could make people begin to question my husband’s integrity.

The sad thing is while I endure the day in day out nausea and dizzy spells caused by this war I am fighting, it is inevitably a losing battle. This battle is not against cancer as an outsider looking in may imagine at first glance, no, this is a war against myself and one entirely of my own making.

Suicide is a funny thing, usually a quick solution to a painful situation that feels inescapable, in my case it is a long slow drawn out process, but one that can no longer be stopped, and one I have no will to stop. I have anorexia nervosa and bipolar disorder, I am putting a psychologists children through the finest collage and keeping the pharmaceutical industry running.

Whatever motives I had when this journey first began, back when I still had a choice in the matter, have long since been replaced by a compulsion, the simple terrifying phobia I have developed about gaining weight.

My relationship with food and weight loss isn’t because I want to look like some super star in a magazine or attract a man, it never was. This began as a teenager when I was bullied for being overweight and decided to do something about it, lose weight or kill myself. When I did manage to lose weight the thought of ever going back to that dark place was so terrifying that gaining even a gram was unacceptable, in fact I needed to keep losing a few, just in case… Of course that spiralled out of control quickly and soon I was in the grips of Anorexia.

Lots of things happened after that, long story short I moved out of home at 16 and met the love of my life, that relationship saved me in so many ways, I slowly stopped caring about my weight, I was truly happy, one thing led to another and at 17 I was expecting my first child. That pregnancy forced me to give up my vegetarianism due to anemia and that let me cut my final tie with the weight obsession that had owned me for so long.

Over the years 3 more children followed, my weight issues came back from time to time but only in a mild manner, I was able to acknowledge that I didn’t want to go back to that place and chose to eat in a more health conscious manner to avoid excessive weight gain.

Although my weight issues weren’t taking over my life I was still waging war on myself, I had always been at the mercy of my moods, I was generally fairly content and had no reason to complain at all however I would go through months of severe suicidal depression which I tried very hard to hide from the outside world, I had the perfect life after all I shouldn’t be unhappy, it was WRONG to feel that way. In stark contrast to these bleak times I would sometimes find myself so increadibly happy and grateful for the things that I had, my spiritual oneness with nature would bloom and blossom, I would make it my mission to inspire those around me, I would join groups and committees and come up with hundreds of brilliant and grand ideas that I would stay up all night filling notebooks with lists and lists of the things I would do and achieve, telling anybody that would listed all about them.

I went through different phases and tended to spend too much money for our meagre budget on these things, like the time I spent $2000 on Christmas lights after seeing a house all lit up on TV and deciding that I could DEFINITELY win that competition the following Christmas. The time I joined AMWAY which my family and friends have kindly never spoken of again, or that time when I decided that I was going to immerse myself in learning how to cook – a task I have always loathed – so I looked up and saved hundreds of recipes off the internet, I went and bought a stack of expensive pots and pans and cook books and made spreadsheets and lists of menu ideas putting them in catagories. This phase, like all the others ended when eventually I would burn out from trying to do absolutely everything on my list at once and plunge into another deep depression as I was a failure who couldn’t do anything right and generally rather broke given the unwarranted spending on my latest failed venture.

Fast forward several years of similar scenarios and I finally cracked it totally, I went through one of my energetic excited learning phases when I got a new job, this started out great as my bosses loved my enthusiasm and drive and the fact that I was inspiring others too, I won a stack of office awards and life was peachy, then the depression hit again this time was different though, I was still energetic and felt electricity running through me but simultaneously wanted to die. I won another award and hated myself for getting it, I knew I didn’t deserve it, the other staff were whispering about me behind my back and how I was the teacher’s pet. ( A few childish types really were)

 I didn’t trust anyone, they were all against me. I started getting really forgetful, I couldn’t control my thoughts their fast pace I usually used to my learning advantage had gotten out of control, I would sit staring at my work not having a clue what I was doing, I was struggling to remember my name. In order to concentrate even a little bit I had to put headphones on with fast paced dance music, this seemed to occupy the part of my mind that was running away from me and let the other part get a little bit of work done.

Every lunch time I would go for a fast walk to get the energy out and try and hopefully lose a bit more weight while I was at it– I couldn’t control my thoughts but I could control my eating. I didn’t want to sit with my colleagues, they would notice I wasn’t eating and whisper about me even more. I would walk up the little hill and work out the best place to go to die, should I run down to the highway and jump in front of a truck? If I popped out just past the bridge they wouldn’t see me so definitely wouldn’t have time to stop, I didn’t want to fuck it up and end up quadriplegic or something.

Just as Christmas approached it got too much, I thought my head was going to completely explode, I was fairly aware I was going crazy and trying desperately to hide it. I had to go to my in-laws for a big family Christmas do on Christmas eve and I was terrified, I could barely construct a sentence, they would surely know something was up, they couldn’t know, they could never know. The only solution I could come up with was killing myself before Christmas eve.

In a brief moment of clarity I thought perhaps I should see my Dr, so I rang to make an appointment but she was away. I then asked a friend if I could have the number of a psychologist she was seeing, she wasn’t available until after Christmas. So fete had spoken, suicide it was.

I dreamed up several different ways of performing the act which were all dependent on circumstance, I guess I knew I was nuts because I had a paranoid fear of people trying to lock me up in the psych ward and most of my suicide plans involved escape scenarios and fast acting suicide for that exact situation.

My favourite scenario at the time was to do 180km into a particular tree I had picked out. I was doing a lot of high speed driving, the 100km speed limit of my daily journey to work and back felt like snail’s pace to my racing mind and so I tended to float around the 140 mark and on a quiet stretch where the police don’t hang around I tended to do 160 to 180km p/h I had a personal goal to hit the 200km but I kept running out of road.

I had decided that 180km into the tree should be enough to kill me, retrospectively 100km was probably enough but it felt so slow at the time that I remember thinking I would be lucky to sprain an ankle at that low speed.

The trouble with Christmas time, is that our family has A LOT of birthdays in December, so trying to pick the optimum day to kill yourself that wont make the death anniversary on or too close to a birthday proves very difficult. I felt bad for the kids and thought that if I knocked myself off before Christmas it would screw up Christmas for them as someone would have to arrange a funeral and insurance etc so ppl might forget to give them their presents.

So I decided I needed to wait until after Christmas and try my very very hardest to get through the holiday period without giving away my position.

This post is becoming very long and drawn out, but after one failed suicide attempt I did make it through Christmas, My birthday, New Years and just barely my sons birthday in Jan – which there is a post somewhere on here about, the rest is pretty much documented below.

Limbo

So many hours are lost to this disease, the ‘unhelpful thinking’ patterns as the Guru puts it. It’s ridiculous when actually put into words or thought about in any logical way. But still it remains, every hour it creeps in, at some point a comment, something you see or hear that reminds you or god help it you catch your reflection or need to go to the bathroom.

Eating is the worst, it’s a constant battle of instinct vs mind. Your body takes over gorging everything in its path while all you can think is how worthless you are and how desperately you want it all to stop.

If I had a dollar for the amount of times I have glanced at that knife block while stuffing bread down my gob just longing to plunge it deep into my flesh or slice deep into my wrists. End the torture.

Silence. Inside, outside. Peace.

My husband walked in just as I typed that sentence and I slammed the computer down like a 14yr old girl hiding something from her parents. Now he’s upset because I wouldn’t tell him what I was doing, what I was hiding. Is it wrong that I would almost rather he thought I was having an affair than writing a diary like this? Honestly, I don’t know which one of those would hurt him more.

I hate myself every time I eat at the moment. The trouble for my messed up mind is that I am eating constantly and I cant stop. It’s too hard.

Stolen hours

So many hours are lost to this disease, the ‘unhelpful thinking’ patterns as the Guru puts it. It’s ridiculous when actually put into words or thought about in any logical way. But still it remains, every hour it creeps in, at some point a comment, something you see or hear that reminds you or god help it you catch your reflection or need to go to the bathroom.

Eating is the worst, it’s a constant battle of instinct vs mind. Your body takes over gorging everything in its path while all you can think is how worthless you are and how desperately you want it all to stop.

If I had a dollar for the amount of times I have glanced at that knife block while stuffing bread down my gob just longing to plunge it deep into my flesh or slice deep into my wrists. End the torture.

Silence. Inside, outside. Peace.

My husband walked in just as I typed that sentence and I slammed the computer down like a 14yr old girl hiding something from her parents. Now he’s upset because I wouldn’t tell him what I was doing, what I was hiding. Is it wrong that I would almost rather he thought I was having an affair than writing a diary like this? Honestly, I don’t know which one of those would hurt him more.

I hate myself every time I eat at the moment. The trouble for my messed up mind is that I am eating constantly and I cant stop. It’s too hard.

Doubt, is it just the crazy talking?

Sometimes I doubt myself, I doubt the prophecy. Perhaps I really am just crazy and these beliefs I hold so close are nothing but the delusions of a mad women, lost in her sea of darkness and false sense of clarity.

I don’t want it to be that way. I need this to be real, I guess I am frightened of what will be if it isn’t, I am not prepared for that. I have spent so much time conditioning my mind for this that for it not to happen is simply unfathomable.

My best friend was frightened by me the other day. I hate that, it fills me with guilt. They stayed for the Easter weekend and I was getting a little hypo, not even very much, but enough to say more than I should – including telling her that I was off my meds, that was supposed to be a secret. After a conversation that admitted things I normally would save only for this blog she went off to bed and I decided the children HAD to have a easter egg hunt with riddle clues, so I stayed up to write that, and then I cleaned up, and then around 4am I thought the kids and adults for that matter should have a lovely fully cooked Easter breakfast so I set about baking fresh bread, hot cross buns, cooking scrambled eggs and pancakes…

 So while they loved the breakfast I was apparently getting a little too “fast” – I just wanted to get a whole heap done, there was washing up to do and I wanted the egg hunt to go perfectly so was trying -arguabley with limited success - to wrangle 7 children.

It turns out my friend hasn’t seen me like that before and she just happened to already be there otherwise she still wouldn’t have. I normally keep away from friends when I am in those moods, more than anything else because I am busy doing whatever. I certainly get a whole hell of a lot worse than that, didn’t even have crazy racing thoughts or anything but she was freaked out by it and actually went off on a walk wondering if she should do anything.

It may have been because I stopped taking my original meds, I was supposed to keep them up until I next see the pdoc but I was gaining WAY too much weight and I couldn’t take it anymore so I stopped them - and I might add, dropped 4kg in a week, must have been mostly fluid retention.

The meds must have been doing something though because although not even close to as severe as in the past, my moods have been becoming all over the place again, I was pretty steady there for a while, not hyper not even feeling depressed at all and starting to looking forward to some sort of imaginary future.

This reliance on meds makes me seriously question, what IS real?

The ‘me’ on some sort of pharmaceutical induced normal or the me that is ME, pure.  Sure I might be ‘depressed’ and ‘over the top,’ sometimes in one sentence, and yes I might have some ‘alternative’ beliefs about myself and my life that others don’t agree with or seem to understand.

But I have to ask, if I have to be drugged up to conform with everyone else in this mainstream society then isn’t that really the biggest self -delusion of them all?

I think my biggest problem is that I have a family and I need to be able to earn money. If I am going to work where I do I need to conform. I find myself wishing more often than ever that I could just run away and live in the hills, with nobody to answer to but myself. Helping others when I can and then moving on as I choose, nothing to force me to act like everyone else and free to fly from the roof tops or end my life if I choose to. Freedom.

succumb to the call...

I knew it was coming, I could feel it. But I chose not to heed the warning signs and now it is too late, I am owned.

I have had my mind infiltrated by my best friend and worst enemy. I now hear her as a voice separate to my own, which is different to the way it was before. She made a whispered promise to help me reach my goals, to set me free from this depression and stabilize my hectic mood swings as she has an amazing power to gain control. But she lied. Of course she did, she always does.

I am depressed and mostly at her will it is decided whether I retreat into myself or not. I want to partake in conversations I normally would, my own voice is still there in my mind as it always was, making small talk, laughing at jokes and making smart arse comments but I am unable to speak out loud unless permission is given by her. My thoughts are racing, my concentration sucks and my thoughts are darker and darker the further out of control I get the more I need her to be in charge, her voice is loud, belittling, sarcastic and often contradictory, but it keeps me functioning in society.

As much as I know I should fight it, her, for my own mind. I am too weak. Frankly, I am done trying to escape, the pain of fighting it is so much worse than the pain of succumbing to her call and I am stuck again, sucked into the vortex she creates, that I created for myself and I know deep down I won’t get out this time, it’s over.

Like a cliché Stockholm syndrome, I have fallen in love with my captor.

I have been put on Lithium in conjunction with the Lamotrogine for the bipolar and when I went to see my psychiatrist after a fairly good morning with intention to ask for help with the ED I was rendered almost unable to speak or concentrate, her voice loud in my head a constant stream of:

 “You cant say anything you fucking idiot, then she will want to weigh you, maybe put you in hospital and then make you EAT. If you EAT you will get FATTER. Do you want to get FATTER? Do you WANT to get more depressed? Why not go end it now then, jump through the fucking glass window and slice your femoral artery. Go on! I dare you!! You know why you’re not doing it? Why you haven’t killed yourself yet? It’s because you are a weak piece of shit and you’re never going to have any sort of control over yourself.

Watch as you go the fuck home and eat a tub of ice-cream then come back and cry about how sad you are – see now that she thinks your depressed again she’s upping your meds. You know Lithium makes you fat right? REALLY FAT. You have photos on the weekend, you wanted to pretend to be normal for a minute, thin and normal wearing your jeans that used to fit you until you went manic and thought it was ok to eat. Hot chips! REALLY???!! WTF is wrong with you, you dumb whore, each potato has 150 Cal and you had them deep fried in lard and fuck knows how many potatos are in a bucket of chips – Oh and don’t forget the icecream. I hope that you had fun in Melbourne because you are NEVER EVER going back there, 8kg, 8kg!!!!! the consequences aren’t worth it, are they?

Or… You could let me help you? You don’t have to get fatter- even if you can’t pretend but actually have to take the Lithium because of the blood tests. All you have to do is say no. Every time you eat when you take Lithium, your weak piece of shit self will end up binging again, so stop eating. COMPLETELY stop. You know the tricks, you know how to lie! Hell you might even be able to lose weight before the photos! You have 6 days to prove yourself, if you fuck it up then you are a lost cause, destined to be a fat heffer for the rest of your life.”

It was Monday, so I filled my script, went home and didn’t eat, kept my 1hr exercise regime up. Tuesday, I didn’t eat and exercised properly AND got offered a new job with less hours and better pay.  – A reward for my diligence, she suggested.

Wednesday I had off work – this would be my biggest challenge, especially as I was supposed to meet a friend for dinner. I managed to turn dinner into coffee and then of course didn’t have a cake like she did.

then this morning (Thursday) I woke up tired and weak and a bit nauseated, so I didn’t exercise ‘she’ suggested that I weighed myself for the first time in around a month – mostly to teach me a lesson about not exercising – But I was pleasantly surprised, I had actually lost weight!! She allowed me to try on my clack shorts and grey pants and they fit perfectly. So today was allowed to be a good day and she has left me alone somewhat although I was hungry a bit during the day but she gave some gentle encouragement and I managed to deflect it by chewing gum and guzzling diet coke.

I am slightly messed up however by the slight reaction I have been having to the Lithium – an uncontrollable shaking of my hands making it very difficult to write and dizziness, I am aware that some of that may be attributed to the lack of food too.

Then tonight at dinner time I fucked it all up. Badly.

 I ate some zucchini stuffed with cauliflower, garlic, onion and capsicum. It tasted so good while I ate it, until reality set in and I realised what I had done, my stomach seemed to grow before my eyes, I desperately wanted to throw it up but for whatever reason I am incapable of purging, always have been. So we went to bed and watched some episodes of Fringe, all the while I am too busy listening to the loud voice in my head reprimanding me for my actions, I hate myself.

I realised I hadn’t taken my tablets so I got up to do so and for whatever fucked up reason opened the chocolate ice cream sitting in the freezer and bloody ate some – about 100 cal worth. SHIT. So that essentially renders today’s minimal 300 cal exercise null and void and she is very, very angry with me. The voice is too loud to sleep… Many suggestions are that now might be an ideal time to finish things, It would be good timing really as I am changing jobs, the photos will be done so there will be something for the kids to remember me by.

I also now have Lithium at my disposal, FINALLY a drug I can use to properly OD on, I would still combine it with the original cocktail, but at least it guarantees the outcome and is a great quick escape should I find myself cornered.

But on the other hand, this new job brings in great money, so I could stay there as per the original plan and use that extra income so we can finish the house and yards off a bit and make up some savings for the funeral, they are so damn expensive – Far out, a cardboard box in a bonfire at the farm is fine by me. If I can keep up the not eating, eventually my heart will fail and I can sleep in peace, really I do feel this would be a much nicer way of going than the throwing up and shitting myself overdoses may bring if I fuck it up and end up not actually dying, also worried about screwing up the drive into a tree thing and becoming a quadriplegic. Other options tend to involve excessive bloodiness and scaring someone else for life – that’s plain unkind and so of course it’s my last resort.

Tomorrow I have to stick with it. It’s my last day at my old job and they want to take me out for lunch but I have to somehow not eat or maybe choke down a small garden salad as I NEED to be ready for these photos on Sunday. I am also really worried that after that I know I kinda need to start eating a little bit because I have two weeks of intensive training at my new job and I really need to be able to concentrate and remember things, but I am scared to do that. Gaining weight is NOT AN OPTION, and I am worried that I won’t be able to maintain my current weight. I really need to go 3kg under my goal so that I have a safety net to rely on. *sigh*

Back on the roller coaster.

 

 

 

You Are My Sunshine

 Today is the day before mother’s day, I have been really sick this week with Lithium toxicity, went to the doc again today after stopping the lithium 3 days ago, my symptoms are still getting worse, I am trembling constantly, I have a thing called Nystagmus where my eyes jump around all over the place when I try and focus. The doc said the Lithium should have cleared my system by now and has ordered more bloods, she thinks I also have a sinus infection which is contributing to the feeling like hell so I’m on antibiotics too.

I was left feeling awful terrified that this could be permanent, my eyes are so bad that it is taking me forever just to type this and its quite painful. Suicide has been on my mind again lot lately and then something happened this afternoon that made me feel really guilty about it, less like I would be doing them a favour.  

My 5yr old daughter (baby bel) came up to me handing me a little creation she made and said “This is for mother’s day tomorrow but I want to give it to you now. Then I can give it to you again tomorrow.”

This is the card:

She the promptly looks me in the eye and with a big smile starts singing

“You are my sunshine, my only sunshine you make me happy when skies are grey, you never know how much I love you, so please don’t take my sunshine away. 

Mum, you are my sunshine, I love you SOOOOOOOO much!”

Please don’t take my sunshine away. Fuck.

Sorry baby girl, I promise I will try my best I love you Sooooo much too! You may have just saved my life.

 

Betrayal

I don’t usually throw around sentences like “Breach of confidentiality”. This time I was hurt.

The Guru sent my GP a long letter, I don’t actually know what was in the letter exactly but I feel completely betrayed by it. I specifically did not sign the piece of paper allowing her to contact my doctor. I know I shouldn’t care and that she’s ‘trying to look out for me’ and all but frankly she can get fucked. All trust has gone, she should have told me first and she didn’t.

The letter thing was coupled with the fact that the GP suddenly seems to have forgotten which drug she has put me on and after a slightly frenzied discussion on my eating disorder which I hadn’t previously mentioned and must have been in the letter put me way out on the defensive she added that she was glad she put me on something or other starting with L as its not known to cause weight gain where the others do.

I got home and googled it thinking that it might be another name for the one I’m on and it fucking isn’t. It’s a totally different drug and now I’m guaranteed to be back to being a fat fucking whore in no time.

Also the one I am on is supposed to be monitored with blood work so they can make sure it’s not fucking up your liver. Lucky for her I want to die anyway so it fucking my liver would be great news, but other people don’t want to die and they should have the right not to be fucked around. So as general angry retaliation I have researched how many I need to overdose on so maybe that would be the best way to go down, that way she can feel a little bit fucking guilty and think in future before writing down the wrong thing.

I have been hungry as fuck and eating way more than I am comfortable with, my stomach is getting really really flubby and my thighs are so devastating I just want to cry when I see them. I might not be manic but feel far more out of control than I have in a really long time. I would much rather be manic. I am trying to make it to the end of the month as I’m supposed to be going to Melbourne with some friends for a girls weekend, haven’t seen them in a while and should leave them with some good memories I suppose but frankly I can’t be fucked and it doesn’t matter to me.

But at this rate I might not be able to last that long anyway, its prob better before to keep it away from bubba’s birthday after melb doesn’t leave much time, I am pretty much left with the 15^th.

Now I don’t even have a psych I can vent too, before seems like a much better option the more I think about it, I will have to still see her still and pretend I’m not seething at her betrayal and that these meds are making me all fucking better and I don’t need her as much anymore – make up some bull shit that I’m looking forward to so she doesn’t twig something’s off before I get a chance to finalise this thing.

 I am so done with trust betrayal. I have REALLY gotta get some sort of control over my eating too, I can’t believe I could come so far and fuck it up like this and right at the end too. It’s like stopping just before the finish line. At this rate I won’t even fit in the bloody coffin.

A Somewhat Innappropriate Article

Forgive me if this is inappropriate but I am kinda manic right now and so I am going to post it anyway!

*Extra Trigger Warning*

This is hands down best anti suicide article ever written and it’s hilarious to boot. If it doesn’t change your plans at least you get to laugh once more before you go!

http://www.cracked.com/article_15658_the-ten-minute-suicide-guide.html

And yes, I do stupid shit like google suicide, even when I’m high as a kite and not feeling remotely suicidal. I do however challenge myself to re-read this article next time I am about to end it all, I have a feeling it might just be enough to stop me…

On Hallucinations (and not having them)

 

"So Bel, have you had hallucinations?" "No Dr, I have never had them, except one time when I was a kid and had a bad fever...."

She said.

So turns out I may have been wrong about that after all- I have done some reading after stumbling upon something in a you tube clip and apparently standard hallucinations are a little less severe than I thought they were…. I watched a beautiful mind once upon a time so there for I sort of assumed that when ppl said they have hallucinations they were seeing complete people / objects etc talking and walking like the furniture in beauty and the beast….

According to the literature hallucinations can be shadows and dream like imaginings crossing into reality while awake type stuff – erm, I do actually get that. And I get it quite a lot... Usually when I’m fairly hypomanic. It’s particularly bad (and a pain in the neck) when I’m driving as I keep thinking that the shadowy things are are Kangaroos etc beside me about to dart out in front of the car, (let me add that that’s quite realistic where I live) it can be a bit of a problem really because I tend to drive a little over the recommended speed when high so swerving imaginary wildlife isn’t practical.

Now while I was aware these little migraine-like flashes /shadowy things weren’t real I assumed that it was either A speeding related phenomenon or my eyes were just playing up because my body was tireder than my mind (I also tend to not sleep for several days when ‘up’) and had considered seeing an optometrist in case I needed glasses for driving.

As for the dream like imaginings kinda like a little scene playing out in my peripheral usually with mild audio should I care to listen – which I don’t –  you know when you first wake up in the morning and someone is talking to you but your still kinda dreaming? Yeah that. Thankfully this is less common and generally more annoying than anything else, unless I’m mega hypo and then they blur into reality a little too much and it can be hard to judge wtf is real or not. Now I’m wondering if these are actually visual hallucinations…??? God I hope not, that’s weird. I have had a few experiences which may have been hallucinations where I have seen cars plain as day and then they have miraculously disappeared into nowhere and I hate to admit that on one occasion driving to work while reasonably hypomanic I saw two such ‘ghost cars’.

 The first car looked like an unmarked police car (commodore, thick antenna… Aussies you all know what I mean) and I was mildly paranoid that it was tailing me as someone may have dobbed me in for my rather persistent and reckless speeding along that stretch of road, and by mildly I mean thought crossed my mind stayed there for a while and resulted in my working out a getaway plan… then the car disappeared into nothing on a country road with nowhere to turn off.

This experience freaked me out a bit and then closer to town there was a marked cop car doing a speed check on the other side of a straight stretch of road – as I passed I saw it pull out in my rear view mirror and pull a u turn behind me, I was thinking “shit I’m sure I’m not speeding”, looked at the speedo (not speeding) looked in the mirror again and the car had vanished – again nowhere to turn off. That freaked me out a fair bit as I thought that’s two things that I thought I saw, how much of what I am seeing now is real and how much isn’t? It all looks real, but then so did the cop car…

Ok. That sounds WAY crazier when I write it down. Hmm. BUT in my defence when the car ‘vanished’ I was aware that I must have imagined it (so that makes it NOT a delusion. Right?)  In the end due to *hallucinational content I put it down to some sort of subconscious guilt about speeding.

So, I guess there appear to be a few things about me I thought were totally normal/ marginally quirky that don’t actually happen to everyone else and I’m finding it a wee bit disconcerting and am very glad I didn’t TELL anyone about it.

*MS Word claims “hallucinational” isn’t a word, but I think it should be, particularly in this context, it just works.

Anxiety?

 

I don’t know anymore, don’t know how I feel, think I’m possibly sobering up from my latest high, starting to be normal, maybe? Hopefully?

I think I have forgotten what normal feels like, I know I forgot how boring it is to be at home all day, forgot how it feels to have children, forgot to call my friends.

Everyone is asking how I am, haven’t seen me in ages apparently, somehow through the last several months I have managed to avoid everyone, mostly and then in the last two weeks I have seen everyone, its weird. A lot has changed for me in the last half a year, I am still the same person on the outside, but inside I have changed, intensified, too much realisation in a short time is starting to take it’s toll.

I’m actively socialising but it’s different, I don’t know why. I have always been and liked being a social butterfly, the ‘life of the party’ chatterbox, can be relied upon to talk too much too loud and regret things later. Generally this is cause I socialise when I’m hypomanic and hide when I’m depressed but now shit is changing.

I have been rapid cycling so fast for the last three months that now I have held the same emotion for a few weeks I don’t quite know what to make of it, I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop, expecting the fall but it hasn’t happened, I’m not depressed at all. Maybe, just maybe the meds are starting to work?

 I’m still hypo but calmer, clearer of head, but I still want to avoid people, the thought of socialising is freaking me out, part of me is like YES LETS GO, LETS DO EVERYTHING! And the other part is like, oh my god I hate people. I think I’m kind of scared to make plans in case I get too high and embarrass myself or the shoe does drop and depression swallows me up. I haven’t been to work in ages, and the only ppl that know this are TBH, one friend and work. I have been hiding supposed to be at home “resting” but instead I go gallivanting across the country side, shopping.

 I go back to work on Friday and I don’t know what’s going to happen or how to explain my absence to my colleagues. There will be questions that demand answers and I haven’t got them.

 I wonder if this is anxiety? – this is pretty new to me, except for in totally whacked out and entirely reasonable situations or occasionally during intense psychotic manic paranoia…

This, however, is like a generalised social phobia, I’m nervous all the time despite being generally euphorically high when on my own, as soon as someone else enters the picture I start shaking and getting dizzy, check out chicks in woolworths, the road worker guy that yelled at me for speeding, I’m even nervous to see the school bus driver in the mornings, a meeting that merely consists of a ‘good morning’ and comment about the weather.

People keep asking me to do things, I can’t say no, I’ve never been any good at saying no, so of course I say yes, and then spend several hours writing to do/ how to lists relating to whatever I am supposed to do or organise but instead of the usual enthusiastic excited all be it slightly disjointed list writing I regularly participate in when hypo manic, it’s more of a shaky, trembley nervous compulsion, like I gotta do it now, GOTTA or, or I dunno I will forget or something bad will happen and I will fuck it up, I don’t know why but I GOTTA DO IT NOW.

Ugh, it’s an uncomfortable feeling and I don’t like it at all. It does make me a tad more productive than usual, as I have actually been checking items off my list and today I COMPLETED a list – which is big for me as I tend to run around in circles all day very busily getting distracted from one task by another until it’s time to pick up the kids from school and I have half started everything but completed absolutely nothing. Geeze it’s 3am again, that went fast! Last time I looked it was 1am, I’ve been writing non-stop for two hours, I wrote some songs, a rant, a letter I will never post and now this. I should stop writing, Im still not tired – guess I wont sleep again tonight, how unusual. Y doc said the new med Im on should help with sleep, and I think it has a little bit as there is a definite pattern of sleeping every 2^nd night emerging for me at the moment – much better and more sustainable than the 3,4 or 5 nights of no sleep- they generally end badly.  Might go play with you tube now.

Au revoir

Decent into madness

It feels as though, in an effort to regain ones senses, the crystal clarity of madness becomes all too bright and glaring, and it is a scary proposition knowing that when one is at their maddest, they are perhaps actually at their most sane.

I believe in cause and effect, up and down, gravity and of course Newton. Fucking Newton.

In many ways, at least true of human beings, the world runs solely on the basis of perspective, for everything can only be the way in which it is viewed. I view my time in the world as ‘completed’. Yes of course there would have been more things I could have experienced had I chosen to stay, that’s a factual observation. But I finished all that I wished too and have no regrets.

Everything I have done, and for my age I feel I have experienced rather a lot, has been a lesson in gaining this perspective, the low times have sucked at my very soul and challenged all that I thought I ever knew. Yet the high times have always allowed me to reflect positively and often in giddy humour, about those low times and appreciate the insights learned from them.

At the point of writing this I am terribly frightened of the future, or more to the point of having a future. I have experienced before the decent into madness which feels very much like living through the second half of “Flowers for Algenon” and thought to myself that I would never, ever again have to go down that road, that road was done, a mere rest stop on the map of life.

 I naively believed I would not have to experience it again, and if I ever would that with such experience now I was most certainly equipped to handle it. Except I forgot in all my infinite wisdoms and positive reflections of that time, exactly what it felt like. I remember now all too vividly, and I don’t like it.

It certainly isn’t a feeling I can or am willing to try and repeat or maintain over the course of my adult life. It is such things that make me question whether the path I ended up following, the one I was so thrilled to have happened upon was perhaps a mere deviation from the unchangeable ending? Except now it’s not myself I am hurting, it’s everyone else. That is simply not acceptable.

parents, birthdays and mania

Oh my fucking god.

I am so frustrated right now, my parents just came to visit and they are driving me bat shit crazy. I don’t know why it’s such a pain in the arse right now, they didn’t do anything specific, it’s just their nature and the way they deal with things, they have been the way they are forever so I should be used to it, but at the moment I just can’t see through that and let it go.

In a random fit of stupidity a few weeks back, I told my mother about the bipolar thing, at the time I was glad I did but upon reflection it was a dumb ass idea and I should have shut the fuck up about it. She keeps going on and on in her way about stuff and she is really quite stupid. I mean naive as all holy hell and really not very bright – the older I get the more I realise she has absolutely NO CLUE about anything. It really explains how I got away with so much as a kid. Not blind eyes being turned just plain naivety.

I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer myself but I am a damn sight more intelligent – both intellectually and emotionally than she will ever be and I have trouble accepting that when I need my mother to be there for me she is incapable of offering more than a “oh my pooooor dahhling” which although not intended as such is so FUCKING PATRONISING that it makes me want to slap her across the face repeatedly.

Auggggghhhhhhhhh!

It’s fucked up too cause yesterday ended up being AMAZING. Over the past week I had been so worked up about going to my MILS bday dinner that I was more than ready to jump off a cliff before contemplating actually going, but I actually managed to get 3 hrs sleep yesterday morning and woke up feeling – to quote flo rider “43million feet up in the sky full of diamonds”. So had an awesome morning took the better half to the doc for his repeat antibiotics, avoided seeing her myself ( I knew I was a tad hypomanic and didn’t want that taken away from me) by taking the brats to the shop and filling them with ice creams while we waited for him to finish.

Then went to the chemist to pick up the script where while I was waiting accidently bought some new $50 sunnies, a first aid kit for the car and some herbal sleeping tablets…. Oops.

So the day evolved euphorically and full of spontaneous iTunes purchases (80s fever, 101 songs YEAH!) took the kids to my wonderful friend The Gypsy to babysit while we went to the dinner. I was getting pretty damn high by this point and so fucking HAPPY- it had been so long since I had had a pleasant high that it was like a warm bath of relief swept over me. According to the better half apparently I was talking 100miles p hour and changing topics quite rapidly but I don’t think I was that bad really. We went to the shop to grab a present (long live my FAB organisational skills) and who do you think we ran into but the bloody GP! We just smiled a quick hello but then I got the giggles, felt like I was 14 again trying to cover up being stoned, though the better half had mentioned to her that I hadn’t slept in days as she had asked after me when he saw her that morning so she probably had already guessed how I was travelling. I didn’t care though and was actually totally unphased about the impending dinner, had to watch my speeds while driving (constant reminders from back seat driver TBH) as it’s a long weekend here and they have double demerit points – I suppose I do tend to be a little more lead footed than usual when I’m in that kind of mood…

The dinner was lovely, wonder baby was there and so I took her for a little walk outside to try and get her to sleep and also an effort to calm down – didn’t work so well for either party as she seemed as wired as me. All in all it was nice, good food, good company and I reckon I held myself together pretty well although TBH commented later that I was all over the place – eh, could have been a hell of a lot worse – good times like that make me glad I didn’t take out that tree the other day.

As I was a little chatty, I somehow ended up blurting out EVERYTHING about the last few weeks to TBH in the car on the way home, actually made him a little teary eyed which I feel bad about, but it was good to get it off my chest – And realistically I am aware that for the sake of my health I need to be open about this to him since I CAN trust him – and this way if The Guru feels the need to ring him it’s not all coming at him from left field.

We picked up the brats and stayed for a while there, met the Gypsy’s friend who was visiting from up north. The Gypsy always said this girl had replaced me when she moved and fuck was she right LOL! I instantly loved her, she’s kinda like my clone and seemed similarly as high as me and for that matter so did The Gypsy – although there were a few empty red wine bottles floating about the house...

We laughed in a way I haven’t laughed in such a long time and generally felt awesome. I drove home from there still not tired and we got home put the kids to sleep chatted a bit and I took some of my new herbal sleeping tablets because I was still not tired and knew that eventually something was going to crack if I don’t sleep. So fooled around a bit with TBH and listened to music for a bit then around 1am a miracle happened. I actually fell asleep and didn’t wake up until 7am!

I woke still high as a kite, really jittery though, kind of not the pleasant euphoria of the previous night – didn’t have that head clarity anymore. I went for a run down the back paddock which although my mind needed the speed my body was clearly too tired for and I just ended up dizzy with racing thoughts that were more paranoid than not. Hot shower cured the dizziness but not the irritation and I realised that The Parents were going to be arriving with my brother and SIL whom I haven’t seen in 18mths in just a few hours.

 I was kinda mean to the kids while I was trying to clean up – My mums a neat freak and I get the desire for it from her but the brats put a harness on my efforts and trash the joint in my wake which makes me supremely irritated.

House was acceptable but by the time they got there I was marginally calmer but still annoyed and stewing again over and over in my mind about the comments made the other day and of course my mother felt the need to bring it up again right after “hello” – I managed to deflect and change subject somehow but was internally boiling over -as per the beginning of this now unintentionally long winded post.  

Note to self: GET OVER IT!

So now its only 7:30pm and I’m really tired all of a sudden but the brain is still wired. Going 4wheel driving tomoz with The Gypsy and The Replacement so very much looking forward to that and knowing at least I can be however I am and don’t have to struggle to ‘act straight’ without fear of judgement!

 

look her in the eye

She smiles at you, runs into the room to say goodnight,

But you cant tell her why, you cant look her in the eye.

When she says “I love you mummy, more than the whole wide world” it cut you so deep the amount of faith that she’s shown, to think that she loves you when you don’t deserve to be known.

You tell your daughter that you love her too but think to yourself, that mumma’s gotta go soon, she’s already decided what to do, and no amount of lying will change that awful truth, that you were abandoning your babies when they really needed you.

But you’re a selfish mother fucker with too many scars that don’t heal, and it’s no place for children when you can’t control how you feel, when you yell and you scream about nothing that’s real, no reason for your anger expect you’ve eaten a meal.

Until there’s no point, no point in trying, it wouldn’t be fair, spent too much time hiding, the love that should be naturally there. Because to actually feel it? It fucking hurts. The guilt that comes from not really being present after their births, for not giving them attention when they needed it most, from hiding in your bedroom like a god forsaken ghost.

You know they are better off without you, so maybe your final gift to them, won’t just have to shit all over them, but actually help them too, just maybe, you can break the curse of this mother fucking cycle, maybe you can empower what’s left of their youth when you take away their problem like the problem took you.

Bitter and twisted

I’m not cut out to be a mother. Not anymore anyway.

I don’t think I even love them properly anymore, more like an aunt and certainly not like a mother. I can’t take the fighting, and I am unable to discipline them effectively. They don’t care what I say, and frankly I don’t care either. I just want to run away and hide.

I feed them, clothe them and go through the motions when I am home. and I fantasize about disappearing, where I would go, how I would get there – how I would fund it.

I have to take them to school now. One just slammed his finger in the car door – It is wrong that this exasperates me rather than worries or upsets me. Fuck everything.

Hello

Well this is my first post and as you may have guessed by the title, I am yet another one of those manic depressive types they all warn you about. I am an Aussie chick, married with kids and this blog is going to be a candid and sometimes very confronting look into my life with Bipolar Disorder.

I have to assume you are reading this because you either have bipolar disorder, know someone with bipolar disorder, are worried you may have bipolar disorder, you are studying psychology or you are just very, very bored and this is what your random google search spat out today.

This is going to be a sacred place where I will write the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth (including the stuff I cant tell my shrink about). I will share with you random stories about my life including my highest highs and my lowest lows and the stupid and some times not so legal things I get up to and often regret later. I warn you in advance that the content may be upsetting or triggering to some people, if you don't think you can handle it, please don't read it.

*mandatory disclaimer* I am NOT a health care professional (no matter how much I may think I am when I'm hypomanic) and any advice I dish out is purely my own opinion and to be taken as such.

If you are currently feeling suicidal PLEASE stop reading my blog right now as some posts may be triggering. Instead go to THIS page where you can find some contact details for services in your area that CAN help you (Don't roll your eyes, just click the link!)