Reality Check

So the last few weeks I have been feeling really great and "normal" for the most part. My mania hasn't been uncontrollable, my depression hasn't been debilitating, I've been really aware of my triggers and avoiding them and I was excited and hopeful. Then today happened.

I have been wanting to work at the spca for as long as I can remember, I've applied a bunch of times and never heard back and this past Saturday I finally got the call and the interview was the next day. Interview went great, and I was told I would hear back by the end of the week if they wanted me to come I'm for a working interview where I basically volunteer for a day to see it we all fit, it's pretty standard for shelters. Yesterday I got the call asking if I could come in tomorrow (which is today) for my working interview. I was stoked!

After the excitement wore off I realized that I was going to have to wake up at like 6am...my usual bedtime. Right now I feel defeated, frustrated, disappointed and angry with myself. I feel like my bipolar was like "Oh, you think you got rid of me? Guess again bitch" and it decided to show me who's really in charge of my mind and my life. It just doesn't make sense, unlike the last interview panic attack, I actually really, really want this job! I wasn't dreading it, I was looking forward to it so why the panic attacks? It makes no sense.

I don't sleep all night, not even 5 minutes. I get to the back gate like they tell me to and I can't get it. There is a buzzer no one is answering and I don't have a passcode, I'm just stuck waiting, anxiety building. Finally I get let in by someone and they show me where I should go but the manager isn't there so I awkwardly wait outside of the manager's door. People keep passing and looking at me strange or asking if I'm lost and my anxiety keeps building along with my lack of sleep and I know that this is going to end bad. The one of the other staff members comes and asks me if I'm okay and my anxiety peaks and I pop and start crying. Yep I start crying in front of a total stranger. She asks what's wrong and the first thing I can think of is telling her that I got into a car accident on my way there and I was shook up. (I had been in a accident and my car had damage) She called the manager and told her what happened and they rescheduled me for next week. What a fucking disaster.

There's nothing worse than having no control over your mind and moods, to not have control over the thoughts in your head or your body's reaction to them. It fucking sucks and I feel powerless and it my illnesses mercy. Just when I thought I was back in control and getting my life back together I got hit with a reality check, it was all just a farce.

Drugs are bad McKay.

   So, my mom and I were having brunch on Saturday and as we were eating and laughing she suddenly asked me if I ever take drugs. I’m not sure if this has to do with the video I made that shared the aspect of bipolar where people can be prone to recreational drug use or the fact that the day before I could have easily been mistaken for someone high as a kite on crack or meth. I assure her I’m not but if I was it sure as hell wouldn’t be an upper, I can do that all on my own, and if I was to take a drugs I would smoke some weed to chill my ass out, but unfortunately it makes me paranoid and that’s the last thing I need. (For the record I don’t really consider weed a “drug” but it’s illegal in my state so..)

   As a teen I smoked weed, took LSD and dabbled in pills but I’ve never used cocaine or heroin (despite dating a addict for years) and unlike most people I hate alcohol and have only been drunk maybe 3 times in my life and hated it, the only non-prescription drug I take is high doses Benadryl to force me to sleep and my doctors are aware of that.  So with that said, I find it bizarre that in some manic states, especially if I get in a really self destructive state, I WANT to do drugs and get high. I want to just destroy everything and get completely fucked up and wasted and dance on tables and lose my absolute mind. I crave drugs I’ve never tried and if offered them I’m not sure I would say no because I’m in a “fuck everything” mode. I don’t go out an actually seek them because that would require me to be someone social which I am not and put myself in extremely dangerous situations based in the city that I live in and even though I am in a “fuck everything” mind space, I’m not in a suicidal one and am I at least rational enough to not put my safety at risk. Not yet anyway.

   I’m a bit of a medical geek (I have been since I was little) so I always try to analyze my own behavior and signs and symptoms and I am very self-aware of my thoughts, actions and conditions and that my behavior is not “normal”. This doesn’t mean that I can control or stop my thoughts or behavior it just means usually, if I can, I like to “study” or capture something that is happening in the moment on film or take notes and study it later in a different mind state. Being that I don’t have insurance I rely on government care which means I was evaluated by a few different people, diagnosed and then given meds and I check in every 3 months to see if my meds are working or not. I don’t get actual “care”, I don’t get therapy, just some pills and me to figure out, control, and modify my actions and behaviors to try to improve myself and my current state. I’m lucky that I have a very vast medical background and understanding of mental illness and that for the time being I am self aware, but most don’t and I might not remain self aware.

   So at the time being I am able to refrain from recreational drug use but it’s not for a lack of craving them even if I have never tried them or liked them in the past. I’ve considered if it was the behavior or the actual drugs I have wanted during these times and it’s for sure the drugs, I can act out the behavior without them.  Our brain is such a bizarre and fascinating thing. I plan on writing more on this subject because I have more views but I don't want this post to be like 50 paragraphs long so I will just end it here. 

K 

A Synopsis of my History and Current Battle with Bipolar

   Earlier this month was mental health awareness week, the goal is to fight stigma, provide support, educate the public and advocate for equal care. One of the ways people were participating was opening up and talking about their mental illnesses and not being ashamed of them to help remove the stigma attached to it. Everyone knows someone with a mental illness whether they are aware of it or not. People with diabetes, or fibromyalgia or asthma don’t have to hide, lie about or be ashamed of their illnesses that are out of their control and they are free to advocate and educate without having a stigma attached to them and hopefully one day soon people with mental illness will be able to do the same. To help make that possible people suffering with an illness need to stop hiding and start making it a regular part of the conversation. This is me starting my own conversation and sharing my story. Grab a snack if you plan to actually read all of this.

   I was initially diagnosed with Bipolar (aka Manic Depressive) when I was 23 (I'm now 35). I had been through a lot in the year leading up to my diagnosis, I had lost a lot of loved ones in a short amount of time, ended a serious relationship forcing me to move back home, I entered a very bad relationship, I had left my promising career as a zookeeper on a impulse out of anger (which I now know is very bipolar thing to do), I was homeless for a time and I was a mess. When I was 22 I had starting self harming to deal with the stress and pressures and depression I was going through (That’s a whole different topic I will touch on later) and I kept it hidden for a really long time. When it was finally discovered I was in a really bad place mentally, I was severely depressed and my mind was in a really dark and ugly place so when I was offered help I took it, I needed it.

   When I started therapy I had two people I was seeing a psychiatrist and a psychologist and together they diagnosed me as Manic Depressive/Bipolar. When I was given my diagnosis they handed me 2 pamphlets, one on bipolar and one on depression and a handful of prescriptions. That was it. As crazy it seems my family has never been one to have all of the newest technology first so we didn’t have the internet at my house (we didn’t even have cable until I was like 17) so unless I went to the library I really didn’t have much access to find out more information besides what was given to my on the tri-fold given to me. After reading both I decided I was just suffering from depression, I hadn’t been happy in a year I surely hadn’t been manically happy like described in the pamphlet and they were wrong, also the meds me a zombie so I quit talking them all except anti-depressant (without my doctors knowing)

   Fast-forward to the last year and a half or so. I remained on my anti-depressants all of this time, I had tried quitting them but the detox is a bitch so I just kept taking them. In 2013 I left my last stable job with insurance while my other meds were pretty cheap, my anti-depressant were not and to save myself some money I decided that I was going to wean myself off of them. Another thing that had influenced that decision was also that I had been on them so long, how do I know if I even need them anymore? Maybe I “grew” out my depression or something who knows. Bad Choice.

   While anti-depressants are not used to treat bipolar (in fact they can be harmful to take if you are bipolar) I think mine kept my mood swings slightly in check, not completely but enough that I was getting by, I was functioning. Looking back now I was definitely having mood swings and showing all of the classic signs of bipolar, the irritability, tons of sudden burst of creativity and projects started and never finishing them, thinking of all of these great idea and things I was going to do and become and see, sleep issues, spending $80.00 on burts bees chapstick when you don’t even use chapstick, textbook mania. I recently saw a video of me when I was obviously in a manic episode, the fast talking, racing mind, overly happy, I would have slapped me I was so annoying. It was there, it just wasn’t bad enough for it to really fuck up my life or for other people to see it as something wrong. Instead of seeing bipolar, I was considered a bitch, told I was too sensitive, told I was lazy, selfish, unrealistic in my goals, that I never followed through, I was unreliable, antisocial, to talkative, over reactive, dramatic, short tempered etc….I was all of those things, but there was a reason I was all of those things, I’m bipolar.

   I was (and hope to resume studying to be a midwife), about a year ago the midwife I was studying under decided to retire which had kinda left me screwed for lack of a better word. The stress of not knowing how I am going to finish school, along with the thought of having to move across the country to do so and financial worries started me into a tailspin. I was hiding my bipolar pretty well for a while and then in July I had an extremely bad panic attack at the wrong place at the wrong time and I couldn’t hide how bad it had gotten any longer. I had been having small panic attacks for a few months but this one was at a level I didn’t realize was possible. I had no choice but to tell my mom what had been going on and ask for help, I was no longer able to hide it or really function normally. Since I don’t have insurance I had to start looking into public health clinics and such and the soonest available appointment was in 13 weeks, which I was finally able to go to last week.

   It’s been a very trying 13 weeks for everyone, I got a few meds from my regular doctor who decided to take the opportunity of having a crying mess of a woman alone as the last patient to inappropriately touch me, because who will people believe the doctor or the woman on the handful of meds? The medications he gave me made me a zombie and were not very help full.

   My manic episodes have increased and have become much more intense, if you have ever seen the tv show Homeland and the chick goes "crazy"…that’s been me. My brain runs a thousand miles a minute, my thoughts race and jump all over, I can’t focus on one thing, and my speech is really fast at times to match it. I’m very anxious about my things and people touching my things and being in my space, it can really send me almost into a panic attack at times. I don’t do well with change at the moment, painting my room was horrible, I know it’s simply a new paint color but my brain just doesn’t handle things like that well at the moment. Also packing my room so we can sell the house has been a huge ordeal but thankfully my mother is a saint and has been very understanding and tolerant of my madness, she see’s my struggle. I can also be very short tempered and get frustrated easily and have moment of rage, something as simple as not being able to find my comb can set me off big time, again, my mother would be a saint if she was catholic.

  I'm not going to lie, the mania is not always bad, I can become super creative (jewelry making) and super productive, I become goal oriented and get shit done, I have ambition, I’m super happy and want to dance around and be social and everything is rainbows and whales, the world is brighter and music sounds better and it’s amazing and it’s great. That stage of mania can be addictive, that phase of mania is why a lot of people either go off of their meds or refuse to take them, it’s a high without the drugs. When I am in certain stages of mania I won’t sleep for days because my brain won’t turn off or it gets stuck on one idea and won’t let go. When we went to Oregon earlier this month we wanted to get a wind chime as a souvenir and we didn’t so I looked up how to make them (creative spike) and since I did that I can’t sleep at night because all my brain can do is focus on this fucking wind chime, I even went to Lowe's and looked priced supplies and that has helped some but my brain gets stuck on things and won’t let go of them.

   Not all mania is fun and rainbows and whales either, it can extremely dangerous and scary not only for me but for those around me. It’s what I imagine what it would be like being on coke, but it’s just my brain chemistry being off. I will be up for days and even my meds won't help, my brain races really fast and jumps around and I will lost my train of thought, my speech will be so fast it is hard to keep up with and I can't stop moving, I will pace around my house and keep picking things up and setting them down. I've worked in the medical field for a long time now, if I saw me, I wouldn't believe that I wasn't on drugs. 

My depression has also gotten worse. It’s not as frequent and so far it hasn’t lasted as long as my manic phases have but it’s much worse than it was before. I will lock myself in my room for days at a time and won’t do anything but sleep, I barley even eat. The world comes crashing down around me and everything is black and dark and everything hurts, physically hurts. Nothing in the world can pull me out of my bed or room at these times and I will lock my door and not let anyone in. Someday I can even start as one and transition to the other phase or have both at the same time, those are the worse, your mind had rapid and repeated depressing thoughts and it’s bad.

So that is my story as of now, it’s not over and hopefully it improves. This is not to say I don’t have normal days, I do, but right now they are fewer and farther in between but I do have them. I finally got to see a doctor at the free clinic and let me tell you our mental health care system sucks. Really sucks. Thankfully I have family to help me but I now understand how so many people end up on the street. I was evaluated by two people over several hours given a bunch of medications and told to come back in 3 months. I go there once a month for my refills and have a check in every 3 months to see if they need to be adjusted, that’s it. That’s scary.

So that is my back story, I'm not sure what my plans are with this blog as of yet. For me writing is very therapeutic, so a of this might just be like a journal open to the world to see what it's like in my mind and how this all effects me and hopefully to journal my progress back to being more functional and onto being a midwife. Some of it will be informative and to help educate people on bipolar disorder and help other's learn as I learn. I don't know how often I will write, at times it might be several times a day other times it might be once a month we shall see. So welcome to My Jagged Mind.

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