Depression

Reduce – Do Over? Hope not.

/ Robin

This is a quick summary of my day.

We stopped at my Med provider who quickly added Latuda to my 400 MG Lamictal and changed my chill pill back to Diazapam. (It doesn’t kick my butt so badly.)

The day moved from fun to 100% stress to terror to worry and back around again. I’m completely spent. Rundown.  The drive was different but as heavy as expected.  The Espionage Exhibition was cool. Sydney got sick and had to leave. No restrooms are in the thing. I’d been really wanting to see the Espionage Exhibition at the Seattle Science Center for months. We needed to leave early and brave traffic once again because she was sick. 40 minutes from home. I did this curious newish thing I’ve started doing driving home. For an instant,  my brain shuts off and it’s like I’m asleep. It freaks me out! I sing and yell and have people talk to me and nothing helps. It’s very, very scary.  I had Kyle drive the last 30 minutes home.

We arrived home to our puppy and I freaked out (ok, maybe not quite). Bailey,  my 6 month old Heeler and companion dog in training, wasn’t waiting for us at the top of the stairs. I was very concerned. She always does. Always. She came around the corner with a pretty big heater vent hanging from her collar. OMG! At first I froze.  I thought she was choking.  She’s okay.  It stressed her and Sydney and I out. Kyle came in after it was off and laughed. What else could he do?

Earlier in the day Sydney had explained to Jane why she was wanting to kill me lately. That’s when she changed my meds. Fast forward again to after we helped Bailey… I slammed the microwave door heating my dinner. Before I became more belligerent I took my food to my room, ate and took my meds with a chill pill. Now my puppy, my companion dog to be, is passed out next to me on my bed.

I got to tell Jessica,  my 22 year old who is off in the Air Force,  about my day. I’ve calmed down. Now my back is lighting up. Time for a painkiller. 

Wow! I didn’t expect my day to play out like this. I managed to maintain much better than I expected. But, I’m so thankful for my chill pill. Boy am I ever!

I am most thankful though,  for my kids. They are so incredible!

Chillin’ in Seattle or What?

/ Robin

It’s 9:30 am and I’m waiting to do in to see my med provider before heading to Seattle with my son (19) and daughter (17) for the day. I’m still not up to a satisfactory dosage of my Lamictal yet and this chill pill I take sometimes kicks my butt too much. Wanna chill, not sleep while driving. .. the next day.

I’m still talking way too much and too fast. It, I, annoy the kids to death. The don’t bother to talk. I do it for everyone.

I feel shame and I grieve for the things I miss they might have shared while I rambled on and on about…?

I’ve made Syd come in with me. I bother her the most. My med provider (Jane) and I don’t communicate well and I’m bad enough that I really need her to understand what is meant when she says she wants to kill me. That needs to stop.

I’ll let you know how it all turns out.

I Am . . . Afraid

/ Robin

I’m still depressed. My Lamictal dosage is rising steadily and is currently at 350 mg daily. Maybe it’s starting to work because I already was taking 200 mg daily. Maybe I realized how afraid I really am. Oh sure, I go to see my med provider every two weeks again (back up from once monthly) and my counselor weekly, but somehow I “feel” worse off. It’s almost as if having my mental/emotional needs addressed again with such intensity tripped me up really hard. I’m at a place in life where I am so afraid… it’s the kind of fear that sucks your brain out and leaves you stunned and unable to think straight. The depression, anxiety and anger seem like they are swarming about me. They suck at my soul. They lap at the fallen corner stone of my very being…

I’ve lost my purpose and I’m so afraid.

I was trying to think of an image that would demonstrate how I feel. It’s pretty hard to Google “afraid, depressed, anxious, without purpose” and expect anything helpful to pop up. I thought of Leonardo de Vinci  and some of they dramatic faces he drew. I looked at a few and this one seems to come kind of near to what I want you to see… my fear. The man is shouting. The setting is the Battle of Anghiari.

 

da_vinci_shouting_man

da Vinci’s “Shouting Man”

Let me try to explain to you my friend, what I mean. During some of my very dark periods I was able to hold on to one thing, one certainty, that kept me going and gave me purpose… a reason to live. That purpose was to be the best mom that I could be and raise my kids to be the best people they could be. Growth them strong.

Now, they are old enough to not need me to keep my hand locked firmly on the tiller of their lives. They steer themselves. They are moving on and I am lost. From the time my eldest was born in 1992 my passion, my calling, my purpose, was to be “Mom”. I’ve thought that I have had other purposes along the trail of my life, but somehow being “Mom” over shadowed them all and now I am fighting myself just to remember what I believed I needed and wanted passionately to do… to be.

I am afraid that I’m a failure. No one needs me any longer. I keep to myself mostly. My family and I are not particularly close. I don’t work or volunteer. Putting it short: I don’t feel that I have anything to contribute to the world.

My fear has driven me off my path. I allowed bushes and hedges to crowd my chosen path and completely obscure it from my vision. I know, well, I think I knew what my “vocation”, that is what my passion was. I feel empty and bruised. I don’t want life to touch me. I seem to think it will injure me by exposing my worthlessness to me.

I’m trying to pull together my wits and engage in the monumental fight with myself to reclaim who I am and what I’m about, my purpose.

And, my pain meds for chronic back pain (degenerating disks all up/down my spine have kicked my butt and I just nodded off. Tomorrow I’ll attempt to pull myself together enough to begin discussing with myself how to deal with myself this time. I’ve already worked it out in advanced, but this lack of purpose, this is new and frighting.

I’m letting the drug induced sleep take me away from the fear for a time. Starting physical therapy this last week had kicked up my pain, as I knew it would. It makes the whole of me even more difficult to deal with. At this particular moment I feel like in the morning I can begin to pull my will back together. That is, unless I conveniently forget what I intend on doing with myself, again.

Time to sleep.

Not Feeling Especially Smart

/ Robin

I’m moving all my calendar stuff to my smartphone to make things easier to keep track of. My kids can add their stuff to it which is good because we have one car, two drivers, another driver in training and life 25 minutes and are from civilized town. An hour appointment takes at least a two hour commitment. But that’s not what I want to talk about.

At one o’clock today (well, now its much later. That appointment was June 18th) I had my first meeting with my new counselor. This will be my third counselor at this facility. No, I’m not knocking them off (though the last one was starting to torque my screws an awful lot of the time). Their lives have given them cause to move on. And thus, out of this auspicious place I frequent. Sigh… I don’t know what I’m talking about now…

I was going over in my head how I wanted to approach Julia (my new counselor). I’ve had probably over a dozen through the years. I’ve had lots of practice breaking them in and then hoping they’ll go away. I have found that the first few visits tend to set the stage for the life of the professional relationship. Unless, I’m mostly off my rocker at the start. They seem able to adjust when I get my footing again.

Today I talked over with what I wanted to talk Julia about with myself all the way there (remember the drive? 30 min. plus today) and decided I needed to explore anger and anxiety. These were to be my platforms upon which I would begining a hopefully fruitful relationship.

I’d chosen these two topics because of the study I’ve been make of myself, of my mind and who I am. How I am. I always hunger to learn more. I hope that I change myself and my behavior because of understanding, knowledge, wisdom that I gain in my studies. I cannot correct my behavior or change my thoughts or emotions if I have drugs… but no understanding. Focus. Wisdom. Contemplation in the light of … well, light.

TRANSLATION: Anxiety and anger are smackin’ me across the face!

I’ve thought for some time now that my mental health people and I need to re-focus and add to my nice and untidy Bipolar mix the delectable… anxiety.

Anger. It seems do go hand in hand with anxiety. Hand in hand with depression and pretty much every facet of Bipolar. At least that’s my experience.

I was very excited and full of dread. I was right on time leaving the house. Ran into very heavy traffic half way there and before I ever got to the highway. Finally, slipping around and going faster. My brain started to rattle around and I knew something was amiss. Yep. I parked when I arrived and opened my calendar…

… and saw I was exactly on time… PLUS 60 MINUTES.

Damn, damn, damn!!! I missed my appointment.

Yes, I was angry. I stopped and thought about it. I decided I was going to be angry till I calmed down… If you get my mesning. I had been thinking on my way that being late or not having something be the way I thought it should be was a serious problem for me. I suspect it probably is for everyone. It is one of the major starting places for/of anger with me. One of my difficulties, being Bipolar, is that I very much do not/cannot control my reaction when I irritated. All too often … damn. I just nodded off.

Think of it like this. 1. Get angry. 2. Refuse to accept that I am angry. 3. Refuse to think about it. 4. Refuse to acknowledge that I’m angry and I’m the one making myself angry. 5. Blood boils. 6. Voice raises. 7. Things fly.

Ok, I exaggerated, but you get the picture?

I’ve been pretty drugged up for years. I’m on the light side of a consistent state of medication right now. Meaning: I’m more or less stable and I asked for my Lamictal dosage to be lowered or stopped (to try something else) because of the serious and sever sunburns I was getting. Get this… I was getting sunburned through my cloths. Add this additional annoyance and I’m beginning the feel itch of those disruptive emotions.

I’m aware I’m playing with fire. My watercolor drip is starbursting more than I’d like it to. I’m trying to say that “bad” bits of my Bipolar are quietly disrupting the steadiness.

I messed up. I wanted to see this woman and talk about anxiety and anger. I got angry, which is my habit, when I made this stupid mistake I at least was punctually.

However, I realize I’m unused to trying to squish my anger. I’ve been medicated into being mostly under control for long enough that my “self” was having difficulties keeping me from popping out the seams. I’ve been getting irritated. Annoyed. Angry. Lots of things.

My youngest daughter especially doesn’t understand. I didn’t realize what was happening between us until I’d yelled at her recently… more than once. Ok, not exactly “at” her. I just yelled. I’m noisy at the best of times. When I’m angry . . . I’m loud and ugly and scary.

See what happens when I write to you and I boil my brain?

Time for sleep actually laying on my bed with my head on my pillow.

Now what was I talking about?

Eclectic Me – Bipolar 1

/ Robin

I’d like to think that I’m eclectic. Maybe its because in addition to hosting Bipolar 1 I’m also providing a home for the delightful yet unpretentious full blown dalliance of ADHD. For the moment sidestep everything accept the fact that my grey cells are no place for the faint of heart.

Translation: Stick my brain bits of everything in a blender and when it stops… eclectic is what you get. Eclectic. That’s me. My brain gobbles up anything and everything and shoots out something cool, something made from various different sources, something transcending one single idea. I think.

Thinking of my brain, of me, as being eclectic is a gift. Why? You ask? It’s simple. Eclectic takes the best of many different systems (I hope I stick with the best) and make them into something new. Let me try something.

1. I have Bipolar Type 1. I cycle rapidly and/or experience mixed states. Today I’m rumbling on towards mania.
2. I have ADHD. I experience what I think of as “wandering brain syndrome”.
3. Add BP1 with ADHD and you have a hopped up manic or depressed (or both) brain that can’t sit still.

Eclectic. . . I hope.

While I enjoy the thrill of discovery that I find accompanies this eclectica, I also find that as brilliant as I consider my ideas and such to be… I often forget what I was being so brilliant about.

My attention span is, um, alright – I barely have an attention span. And what is a “span” and how does it attend? What?

Talk about sucking.

I carry pads of paper or my smartphone. My phone is cool because my notes (I use GNotes) on it are synced with the same app on my Chromebook. I can keep track of what I was thinking pretty much all the time. I may experience “wandering brain syndrome” a bit more energetically. When this happens, I’ll probably (usually) forget that I even took notes.

Damn.

I might have worked out how to feed the planet, the whole planet, in one month!

Damn. Wander where it went?

The reason I’m dedicating this post to having an eclectic (BP1/ADHD) brain is because I find myself being stuck mentally and not able to focus on what I want to say here. Say to you. My brain draws information from anything it wants to and sticks them together. I do enjoy it when the ideas stick together on their own.

Wait, back on track please.

Right. I think sometimes that I’m writing this blog (Redux – doing over) so I can share my journey of living with BP1 with you. Never mind that both depression and mania tend to make it difficult to really focus on doing something as specific as writing and making sense when I do it.

Translation: I want to talk about so many things all the time… all the time… that I always want to talk about things I don’t think will fit here. So I write nothing. My ADHD is perfectly happy with the situation. It’s already bored and off to the next thing.

The way my brain works is very similar to the way our puppy’s brain works – it never stops!

All this is just to say that I’ve finally come to the conclusion that it’s okay, even healthy, for me to write on whatever my brain is playing with at the moment.

It is my hope that my BP1 and ADHD will join forces and keep you interested.

I hear-by grant to my brain all rights and privileges due when I experience a moment of clarity.

What was I talking about?