Oh man has it been a busy day today. My supervisor had to take a few days off this week at very short notice which left me to cover her ward. This was a daunting prospect to say the least, although with some guidance and some reassurance that I wasn’t, in fact, about to die from stress I somehow made it through the day and finished everything that needed finishing. Ok so I had to ask for a list of things that were: urgent, urgent urgent, and standard run of the mill priority but with that as my guide I tread head held high(ish) through the confusion that came with being on my own and having to be autonomous.
I swam!!!! So often I was convinced I was going to sink, but no, I managed to swim, albeit with armbands but swim nonetheless.
As a consequence of my busy day I am now struggling to keep my eyes open but I guess that is to be expected. I am keeping myself awake until a reasonable bedtime by checking the important internet stuff, like this, and re-reading Twilight, again. I can’t afford to break routine now. I should be studying although I have the feeling that my last two brain cells may just die if they are pushed any further.
I think (I hope) I have managed to successfully stave off a depressive episode for a bit longer. This is what I hate about my meds, I never got high highs just a few scarce amazing hypomanias and millions (ok slight overstatement) of crippling (not overstated) depressions, and the meds have stopped my highs and not stopped my lows. It all leaves me feeling a little disheartened. Although I do know that this is probably the most well I have been in years, probably since my teens – I don’t mean right in this present minute but as a whole, in the grand scheme of things my cycling has slowed down somewhat, become more predictable and things aren’t so extreme. In short, my life is not nearly so chaotic and unpredictable as it used to be. Some of me finds this a drag and wants to break from the monotony, part of me loves chaos and thrives on it. The sensible part of me says listen to the Doctors and be a good girl. I am going to be a good girl.
This illness is messing with my brain though. I go from wanting to be invisible to wanting to be the centre of attention but feel uncomfortable in the middle. I crave for someone to notice when I am not doing well yet resent them when they do. It’s total double standards and a lose-lose situation. I feel so self-centred at the moment but if I have my sensible head on I realise that this is all just self-criticism and if I am being self-centred then it’s probably because I need to be or that I am getting sick again and am retreating into my head where naturally things are about me. It’s as if a lot of the time I spend looking through a filter. Sometimes it is too tiring to filter stuff out so I stop looking and concentrate on what I have already let in or at other times concentrate so much on looking at the filter itself that I don’t see outside of it.
When did I get so caught up in this illness? When did it start to define me at a cellular level? When did it attach itself to every ounce of my being? I don’t know the answers, I don’t think I want to know the answers. It isn’t who I am but it is. I find that very hard to cope with. I don’t know when this illness started to become such a large part of my life. For a long time it did define everything I did, that was before I was diagnosed and knew what it was. I look back and see the car crash that was the last few years and can say – “oh yeah now I can see that I was very ill”. The thing is I can only see when I am ill in hindsight. I am a very good reflector, possibly too good, it stops me living in the present. I don’t want to be self-centred and I don’t want everything to be broken down and analysed as part of my illness. I want to be able to say – look, these are my actual flaws and not a product of a wonky brain.
I was asked recently why I gravitate towards “damaged” people – in the widest sense of damaged. I gave many answers and at the time they were all correct – that I like helping people, that I care, that people tend to gravitate towards people in similar circumstances i.e. fucked up people are attracted to fucked up people.
There is one more answer, the one I didn’t think of at the time and probably the one that is the most true of all: It takes the spotlight off me and it, if even for a second, helps me to pretend that I am not ill. It’s avoidance. Pure and simple. I do not want to deal with the issues in my life so, like a coward, I run away, I hide or I find a distraction. Maybe I should work on that with my psychologist when he gets back from his holidays.
Anyway, that is quite enough for now. My two brain cells are now conspiring against me and plotting their revenge 
Kx
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tagged: avoidance, bipolar, Bipolar is not a fashion statement, busy, cowards, defining myself, depression, double standards, illness, medication, sensible, sink or swim, surviving, tired, work
What meds are you on hun? I forget… :S
Anyone would be tired after a day like that, so don’t beat yourself up for it. Sounds like you did an amazing job and you should be proud of yourself… or at least try.
I’m on Lamotrigine. I’m getting used to the tiredness now. FOUR DAYS TO GO!!!!
Told ya you could do it
I don’t know much about the rapid cycling variants of Bipolar but there are mood stabilisers that have good anti-depressant qualities and take more of the edge off the lows and not just the highs.
Sometimes I wish I could take them myself, as the lows feel so shit, but my “sensible mind” knows I’m on the right meds given my highs are pretty damn high (diagnosed Bipolar I after being hospitalised with acute manic psychosis). In your case, though, I’d be asking your doctors about those options. Hypomania may be more noticeable and therefore people are always keen to treat it, but with the depression by its very nature you tend to suffer tremendously, often alone and in silence.
And for what its worth, I’ve found it helpful and liberating to think of Bipolar as being an essential part of who I am. I gladly seek treatments to try and manage the symptoms that make my life hard, but I wouldn’t take a “magic cure” if one was available, because that doesn’t even make sense – if I was not like this, I would be such a different person as to not really be “me” anymore.
Our personalities, our “true selves”, are all just brain chemistry and neural physiology, for everyone on this planet., whether mentally ill or not. We just have to make do as best we can with what we’ve been given, the good and the bad – of course sometimes we need medications or the like to cope with the worst of the bad.
I’ll admit, this is more of a hypomanic view than a depressed one. Ask me in 6 months, probably get a different answer. But when I think like this when I am depressed, I do tend to feel a bit better about how much of a fuck up I am.