RealMental

By jb

One of the most interesting things about meeting new people, and starting new parts of your life, is that you get to see yourself through new eyes. I imagine that some people don’t like it, but I find it intriguing.

My most embarrassing–and perhaps most endearing–quality is that I have a seeming inability to pull shit together. I’m that girl–the one whose backpack falls open on the street, the one who always manages to forget something, the one who stands on the street in the rain while a car drives by, sending a 4 foot spray of water halfway up her torso. My med school friends Jacob and Joe take a good amount of pleasure just in watching my life; they don’t hide their laughter, and–halfway up the lecture hall, dripping wet and late–I find myself laughing too.

On Friday, I was going through my morning ritual of rummaging through papers to find that day’s lecture slides. I couldn’t find my biochem notes, and searched for three or four minutes before I found them crumpled up at the bottom of my backpack. I did my best to flatten them out as Joe and I laughed. “You’re a mess,” he said. “A mess.” And I am.

But I wasn’t always this way. I remember, once, I was walking through my high school hallway with a friend, and she looked at me and said, “You smile, and you look like you have it all figured out.”

And I thought I did. Preparing to go to the college of my choice, dating the
most wonderful boy, making good grades with lots of friends: I did think I had it all figured out. But somewhere along the way, I lost that poise and
perfectionism. I broke my back, I made some Bs, I slept through a Calc 3 test and finally allowed myself to skip a class or two. Sometimes, I thought my mind had cracked, and when I was sad, all I wanted to do was sleep or get better, but when the sadness went away, I thought my life was back on track.

I remember visiting my therapist as a sophomore, in late spring, and wondering why I was there. I was happy, wasn’t I? I had things figured out again, didn’t I? I thought I had come to terms with losing my job, and I thought things would be perfect again.

I can’t pretend that I am much older, or even much wiser, than I was then. But two years up the road, I realized that things didn’t have to be perfect, and that this is my life, and I love it. I don’t mind being a mess–it’s just what I do, and it works for me. As long as I have people laughing with me, I’m fine. It’s when the laughter stops that it gets scary.

Yesterday was the sixth month anniversary of my first dose of Lamictal, the drug I take to control my bipolar disorder. It is the sixth month anniversary, also, of the day I hit my eye on Joey’s bed during a tickle fight and he decided to stop saying “I don’t know” and “Maybe” and take me back as his mess, his bipolar wreck of a girl. The day we started laughing again.

He’s been visiting the last two days, and we have been doing our thing–lying together watching the B-52s on YouTube. Loading the dishwasher while singing to the Village People. Eating too much ice cream. Sleeping in a bed where we thrash around and steal each others’ blanket space, and roll onto each others’ pillows and turn in circles and talk incoherently all night.

Waking up, pulling the covers back to my side, I smiled knowing that this fitful oppositional sleep is the best sleep I get, and it’s the sleep I want for the rest of my life.

Loving him is the best thing I’ve ever done, even if I do it as a mess, even if I fucked it up a million times. We cannot laugh about the past, and I am bipolar, and I will be medicated for the rest of my life, and I surely am a wreck, a shambles, a hilarious mess–but as long as we can keep laughing at the present, I’ll be fine.

Originally published here.

It’s no secret that Bipolar Disorder is genetic. It was a “surprise” that I was the first person in our family to be diagnosed as bipolar, though. I’ve long felt inadequate, intellectually, compared with my parents the Ph.D.s, but I was the one who was proactive enough about her dysfunction to make thrashing overtures toward diagnosis and treatment. Since my diagnosis and miraculous recovery of the person I’ve suspected I could be all along, I’ve been trying to nudge both my parents along toward getting themselves checked out, with little success. But I’m convinced they’re both bipolar, given what I now know, and I’ve been trying to get them to see the light.

My mom’s resistance ended dramatically, with her psychotic (but happy! oh, so happy!) episode this spring, after which she was hospitalized and diagnosed as Bipolar, and her crippling depression (lasting my whole life) at last yielded to a combination of antipsychotic and mood stabilizers. Amazing– but not really. When your depression’s affected you for so long, no anti-depressant makes a dent, and you used to have pretenatural spurts of productivity when you were in grad school (did I mention bipolar often most obviously manifests itself in the late teens and early twenties?), why wouldn’t you believe your daughter when she tells you that maybe you should see a shrink to reevaluate your depression, given your daughter’s diagnosis and resounding response? But all’s well that ends well, and now her meds seem to put her in to a receptive frame of mind, and she seems to be doing her homework, reading up and meeting with her care team regularly.

My dad’s been more stubborn. Granted, he was functional in his dysfunction for much longer than my mom was– it took him until I was 12 before his alcoholism cost him not just his job for a few weeks but also his driver’s license. At that point, he took sobriety seriously, and made up his mind to stop the self-medication he’d been indulging in since he was in graduate school (that whole teens & twenties thing again). After he became sober, his moods didn’t change minute to minute, but he was still bouncing between talkative, charming, funny, and reticent, snappy, shy, disinterested, apathetic, inactive. He wasn’t able to find a shrink he liked in the immediate aftermath of the arrest, and made do with the talk therapy at AA. And then the blood pressure meds came along. (Blood pressure meds are sometimes used in combination with antipsychotics to assist/speed the effect of an antipsychotic when someone’s in an acute episode.) He’s on a serious dose of the bp meds, and they dial down what he calls “the jiggies,” but they also make him very slow in the morning. And in the meantime, he’s still sad. And lonely. He seems resolved to believe he’s just a naturally melancholy person with too much distemper to successfully live with someone else, but I see someone whose long and deep depressive episodes aren’t being appropriately managed, and who could be a lot happier.

After having such amazing relief of my own misery, I want the same for them. I know I inherited it from them, but nobody wants to acknowledge they’re “mentally ill,” even though the failure to acknowledge it can be so disastrous. Even with the proof in front of them of the success of appropriate medication and talk therapy, though, they continued to be stubborn. My mom would always say, when I was being hyper, or in a raging, nasty, irritable mood on the downturn, “you’re just like your father.” And my dad would always say, when I’d burst into tears at the littlest thing, “you’re just like your mother.” Um, yeah. But I’m like you, too– that’s the point. Too bad you’re too blind to see it.

Republished from BipolarLawyerCook.

How do I differentiate between all the things that are ”wrong” with me? How do I know which symptom is causing what? I get so scared that this is it. This is as good as I am ever going to feel. Anxiety is the number one thing that has plaqued me since I was 12. I am on Paxil to help with that. I know if I go see my Regular doctor she will throw sedatives at me. My psychiatrist is gone for 10 days and has no back up. There seems to be no alternative when you are in crisis except the emergency room and wouldn’t THAT help. A possible 10 hour wait., unless I threaten to hurt myself. Which is not where I am. I am anxious, hypomanic too? I have no idea. IT feels like no combination of all the medication will take care of all the things that hurt so much. I am anxious and sad and scared. Scared because maybe this is it? Maybe no one can help me feel better. No drug, no therapist Why does it feel like it is getting worse and not better as we added the medication? Trial and error right? No one can really know what the perfect or near perfect cocktail will work for me. Perhaps it doesn’t exist? That is possible right? Maybe I just have to be sedated on a high dosage of benzodiazepines forever. Be a lifelong addict in order to not feel horrible so often. I love my child, but it was having my child that changed me. Not post-partum depression, but something propelled me from “just” anxious, depressed, OCD and ADD into bipolar 1. This site is a good one for Bipolar 1, by the way http://www.psycheducation.org/. Good information and links to other resources. There are mood charts on there and the fellow who runs the site seems very empathetic and kind.

I feel calmer now. Talking to people, on the interweb or on the phone seems to ground me when I am a ball of anxious-mania-what-the-hell-ever I am feeling. I will throw some more benzos at myself until I can see my psychiatrist again. I am 37, is this really the journey I will have my whole life?

When I got off meds in 2003 I was pretty sure I’d never get back on. It seemed like some kind of accomplishment and I didn’t want to ‘go back.’ My family celebrated. I told people with pride that I’d been able to stop taking them.

Fast forward through hypo-thyroidism, miscarriages, drastic life changes and a few manic episodes and I just left the office of a very nice psychiatrist with my bag bulging with samples.

I alternate feeling responsible to feeling like a failure. And I’m not all together comfortable with taking Paliperidone. My psychiatrist suspects my mood shifts might be tied to Bipolar. I’ve suspected it as well. But taking an anti-psychotic med scares me because of all the side effects so if you’ve taken it, please comment with the good and the bad. I would have been much more comfortable with Effexor and Welbutrin again. I know them well.

But, I have to admit that they wouldn’t touch the weirdness I have going on right now. The intense anger and frustration. The crying and sobbing bouts and not showering or being able to even make a phone call. The feeling like everyone in the world hates me and I have no friends. The knowing for sure that I should get a divorce. The inability to sleep at night and then sleeping until noon for the next week. And then deciding that I love my husband more than anything and I’d never want to be without him, not even for five minutes oh-god-let’s-not-be-apart-at-all-today. And then my mind racing and starting a kazzillion new projects because DUDE I CAN DO ANYTHING. And today I’m going to sell my van. Let’s go right now! And then today I’m never going to sell my van. What a stupid idea! Let’s move! Let’s never move! I mean, c’mon already.

I look forward to having some kind of middle ground. But, I’m scared of this Invega. I mean, muscle spasms? Possible involuntary twitches? More weight gain? It’s so hard to take this leap into the unknown.

I can remember screaming that once, long ago. I was just a kid, and had been talked into getting on “The Spider” at a county fair up in north-central rural Arkansas, by some long-forgotten friend. Some of you may know this ride as “The Octopus,” or another name. What it is, is a kind of a jacked-up version of the Tilt-A-Whirl, with long “arms,” and the cars set on an angle. The arms move up and down, individually, from the base of the machine, spinning around the base simultaneously. While this is going on, each individual CAR is also free to spin at will, which it does, at a crazy pace. Good gosh, I was sick after just a few moments. I can vividly recall screaming at the ride operator to PLEASE stop the machine–and it seemed like a perfectly reasonable request to my 10-year-old brain. They could stop the ride, let me off, and resume the thing for all those fortunate, iron-gutted riders who wished to continue. But the thing was, I needed OFF, and I needed off NOW, before I slung vomit over all and sundry and ruined everybody’s day. I even remember timing my shrieked pleas for mercy so that I was doing the bulk of my screaming precisely as my car swooped down over the ride operator’s head.But that carny was either hard of hearing, uncaring, or just plain MEAN, because he didn’t stop the ride, and I had to, somehow, find within myself the literal intestinal fortitude to tough it out until the ride was over. I still don’t completely understand how, but I did it. And I never, ever, EVER got on an Octopus/Spider/Hellmachine ever again. Although, go figure, I grew up LOVING “The Zipper.” Hardly matters, because ever since my big surgery in the summer of 2000, I can’t even ride the stupid Tilt-A-Whirl any more without getting woozy, and EVERYONE knows that the Tilt-A-Whirl is a BABY ride. Anyway.

My life is feeling a little like that Octopus-ride at the moment. And while I don’t really want to get off and abandon the ride, I’d like to just slow it down a bit, please. Just for a while, so I can catch my breath, and maybe hand off my cotton candy to someone on the ground so it doesn’t wind up spiderwebbed all over me (this is another reference to an ACTUAL childhood carnival experience, when my little sister and myself brilliantly carried cotton-candy onto a Tilt-A-Whirl, with hilariously embarrassing results) in the meantime.

Seriously: I’m not worried about anything superficial, like my metaphorical hair getting messed up–I just don’t want to explode metaphorical stomach contents all over the whole metaphorical world. Wait–the world is real, isn’t it? But you get my meaning. It’s just too much, too fast, too up-and-down, too back-and-forth, and with ENTIRELY too much spinning, one axis mounted upon another, mounted upon yet another…and it seems like some cosmic, metaphorical carny is adding to the base, for yet MORE spinning potential, each and every day, just to see how much I can take. It’s like a NASA stress-test, and I’m the rocket. What, I’m mixing metaphors now? Sue me.

I can’t remember who was with me on the day of that fateful Spider ride, way back when. It can’t have been my sister–she’d have been too short to get on. But whoever it was, whatever young peer, I do remember them more or less talking me through that nightmare ride that seemed it would never end. The way it worked was through distraction, pure and simple. Whoever that wise young friend was (MAN, I wish I could remember, and could thank them), he/she kept my attention focused on his/her voice, and gave me a metaphorical life-preserver to cling to until the vertiginous nightmare was over.

I say all that in the “now” to say this for posterity: Isabella is my life-preserver. It seems that I can’t possibly be tossed about enough that a rousing rendition, complete with hiney-shucking choreography, of “Grey Squirrel, Grey Squirrel, shake your bushy tail…” can’t bring things zooming right back into focus, and still the ground beneath my feet. Her sweet smile, her hugs and kisses, her mere existence is like BEDROCK. I want her to know, when she’s looking back in years hence on these pages, why I did this, wrote these things down. I want her to know that she did this for me, even before she was born. She makes it matter, she makes it right, and she makes me stay on the ride and weather the dizziness.

I guess she made me a “mommyblogger.” Among other things, all of which are vast improvements over anything I was before she came along.

Today’s post was brought to you by the word “metaphorical.”

Originally published at www.ninjapoodles.com

Republished from January 2007.

Please allow me to introduce myself…

Leah was generous enough to let me come and play. Here’s a slightly revised version of one of my first posts as the blogger BipolarLawyerCook. Without revealing any names (to protect the innocent and not-so-innocent), here’s a hopefully somewhat concise description of my learning that I had Bipolar II, and the beginning of a new chapter in my short life.

I’d been depressed since November of 2005, with no particularly good reason. Work was going well– I enjoyed working with my clients and colleagues, even if my cases weren’t always what I would want, either for facts or for sheer excitement. My marriage was going well, as my Better Half was finally employed again after a long period of unemployment, and the money situation was starting to be stable again. And there were no particular Larger Family Issues, since my family and the BH’s family were doing well. My depression and energy levels continued to sag– I gave up yoga, stopped cooking, was exhausted when I came home from work, and I became more anxious about tasks at work that normally wouldn’t have bothered me. I began wasting more time at work, taking longer than I’d like to do routine work, and avoiding doing tasks I did not want to do but which were necessary steps to moving my cases along. One case in particular began to gnaw at me; the facts were stupid, and my client simply wasn’t liable, in my opinion. But opposing counsel was the most stubborn, obstinate, WRONG lawyer I’d ever come up against. I began to doubt that I was seeing the case aright, at which time I started to fall apart, and let the entire case go straight to hell.

At the same time, I was having other health problems, none in and of themselves ultimately life-threatening. Each one contributed to my distress, distraction, and physical and mental discomfort. I couldn’t sleep at night for waking up in a cold sweat thinking about The Problem Case, and yet I was utterly paralyzed from doing anything about it when I got to work.

On the outside, I still put up a pretty good show to my colleagues, who were occupied with their own worries and some pretty large cases our office was handling. This all continued through April 2006, when the prozac my PCP had prescribed stopped working after 6 weeks and I was feeling Worse Than Ever. I made an appointment with Massachusetts’ Lawyers Concerned for Lawyers (www.lclma.org), and after an intake session with a sympathetic but unsentimental social worker, I got a referral to a therapist, who ended our first session with these life-saving words– “You know, I think you might be Bipolar.” Read more »

By Heather

A few weeks ago after a rousing nine holes of golf, my father and I were having a heart to heart over some wine and in my less completely lucid state, I casually mentioned to him that I have a Bipolar disorder after he commented on my improved behavior over the past few months. I said “Oh, I’ve been on medication for my bipolar disorder” with a causal wave of the hand like I said “Oh, I’ve been on some Sudafed for this cold” like it was a perfectly normal thing to say to a parent.

His reaction was at first dubious and then of anger. Not towards me, of that I’m sure, but that anger and sadness of a parent for their child when they perceive that their child is hurting. He pounded his fist on the deck and then looked away and started speaking of a man on the putting green in front of us, while I said that it was really Ok.

My feeling ‘ok’ with being diagnosed with a bipolar disorder has been a long time coming. Though at first it was if someone had simultaneously pulled the carpeting from beneath my feet while clearing up so much of my oft-atrocious behavior for years. Things made sense while not making sense at all because, as I so lovingly announced to my psychiatrist, I’m fucking crazy. But at the same time, everything for the past five years made perfect fucking sense and eerily so.

The other night someone in a recently made group of friends told me how ‘normal’ and ‘un-dramatic’ and ‘bitchy’ I am. I laughed it off and said that my normalcy is only by way of a Lithium and Klonopin cocktail and even then I don’t feel normal. I’m conflicted as one can obviously tell. On the one hand, I’m ok with telling people that I have a bipolar disorder and don’t feel it’s that big of a deal on the other hand, I fear how certain people will react when I tell them that it is impossible for me to function without medication. I’ve yet to tell my mother because of this.

Though for the most part the reaction of others – which probably shouldn’t matter and yet it does – has been fine. Because in their words I’m just so “normal”. I’m still ‘normal’ but am in desperate need of something extra to keep me as rational and ‘normal’ as possible. Then again, who really is ‘normal’ anyway?