Depression

Bipolar – Overload and Fury Road

/ Robin

{Warning: drama ahead.}

It’s said by people who know these kind of things that we really can only handle so many major life events at one time, or say, in one years’ time. I’ve passed the recommended daily disaster/stress quota already for this twelve-month period and I’m scheduling more for the near future. I’m maxed out. Friday night, I lost control.

Last year my father passed away after a horrible 6-month sudden fight with cancer including it spreading to his brain. It changed him at the end. It was horrifying. Add a few more major stressors and we come to Friday night when I lost my shit having been provoked by my son’s first girlfriend who is 21 years old. It could have happened at any time, but she pushed my last button and my “lose my shit” gun was locked and loaded. Then the little female of the species told me in a text that I would “NOT” be seeing my son Saturday. She had the nerve to shout at me! (Never shout in a text – use all caps.)

I’ll come clean and just say that I don’t like this girl. Like all good mom’s, I think she doesn’t measure up to what I believe my son deserves. I could give you a rundown of all the things that in my mind disqualify her as suitable for him, but that’s not what I’m blogging about at the moment.

Some of the stressors recently have included looking for a house for me in a market that is pretty much closed. We’re 45 min south of Seattle. Nuff said. There is no housing available and if you find it, it isn’t cheap. We’ve had a rough time finding a place, but we finally did.

Four days ago I scheduled to have my eldest cat put to everlasting sleep on this coming Tuesday. She too has cancer. She’s terminal and after seeing the cancer in an amazing ultrasound that her vet allowed me to sit in on, I agree that it is obvious that she’s got no hope. It’s very possible she’s in pain.

They wanted to know if I want to hold her. I feel like how can I not? But, how can I? My Mom offered to go sit with me. I said yes. So I’ll hold her when she takes her last breath. I’ll be responsible for that, for putting down a cat that seems as friendly and loving as ever. Okay, maybe she’s more friendly than before. She sits as close to my butt on the sofa that she can and as long as she can. I feel bad, but it annoys me after a while. I don’t like to be crowded. So, I feel guilt. My kids have known her, Siberia, most of their lives. She’s 12 and my youngest is 18. That’s happening Tuesday.

Friday, if all goes as planned, we get the keys to the new house and begin moving my things in. We need the keys for Friday but apparently that might not happen. Stress. The kids have taken the day off specifically because I was told we’d have the keys that day. OMG. We’ll be taking the really breakable things and things like the big TV that doesn’t have a box anymore. I’d like to get a lot moved that first day. I’m going to be depending on my kids heavily.

Sydney, my youngest daughter, is going to paint my bedroom for me. I’m thrilled! I’ve chosen purples! I’m going bold.

If, things go as I’ve planned them (and in the real world they rarely do), Kyle will have my brother’s work van and we’ll start moving small stuff and what not and Syd will start painting. Kyle was here doing a run to the dump with a bunch of furniture I wanted to get rid of for a few hours. He was 4 hours late and couldn’t come back to help with the things I can’t reach… which was the plan… after he went to the dump because he had to go get his girlfriend from work.

Sydney had called me at 9:00 a.m. (Friday) and bowed out because her doggie has a hurt paw and she needs to keep her from licking it. Terrific. Friday wasn’t so smooth. I asked Kyle if he was still coming over to help Saturday, yesterday. He said he and Blank, his live-in girlfriend of 3 months wanted to do some things so he couldn’t be here. I thought we had already agreed he’d be here on all his days off at least part of the time to pack. (I am going through the stuff that has followed me through ten years of a failed marriage and 30 years of living with junk I haven’t even seen some of. In my case, my bipolar has made it hard for me to let go…. That’s for another day.)

Okay, Blank (the girlfriend), I taught my kids that family always comes first. I have deadlines that I can’t put off. My emotional wellbeing and a lot of money are tied up in what happens in the next week or so. She demanded that he be with her Saturday to do a few things. He takes her to work, picks her up after work, spends all evening with her, spends all his off work hours with her and yet she feels neglected. True he’s been helping me packing the last three weeks maybe one day a week and spending time with Siberia before she’s gone for good. He has Fridays off. He takes her to work, then comes to help me, then goes to pick her up from work and goes home. How is that taking him away from her?

Where does a 21-year-old girl, who doesn’t know me or anything about me, get off talking to me the way she did? You’ll just have to take my word for it. She was disrespectful and spoke to me like I was a child. She shouted at me in a text that “he would NOT be helping me.” Who the hell does she think she is?

Why isn’t my son standing up for me? Why isn’t he explaining things to her? It’s his first girlfriend, I know that. But she shoved her control of him in my face and that was the end of it. Oh, she’s offered to come over with him AFTER he gets off work today. Terrific. I’ve never liked her. I think she dresses like a slob and is a ditz. She gets herself so worked up over doing homework that she doesn’t do it. Then she insists on Kyle stay with her when she finally does it, when it’s late. She gets depressed all the time and leans on my son to hold her up. The longer I know her the more I see her using him.

I pride myself on the fact that I don’t gossip about and with family members. This is the first time I’ve had reason to. Last night I texted with Blank’s cousin and Kyle’s best friend about her. I was really looking for muscle to help move my TV, but we got off topic and talked about them. He’s worried about Kyle too.

I haven’t been invited to Kyle and Blank’s house once since he moved in with her. I haven’t been invited to meet them at the park to walk the dogs and get to know each other. I’ve done the inviting. I know, she’s just a child, 21. She’s a female sharing a bed with my son. She’s no child.

I had called and asked if she would like to come over yesterday with Kyle to help me. She was walking her dog and said she’d call me back. She didn’t. Later I got a text from her explaining that she has control over Kyle, not me. Oh hell no. I called her and I went off. Fury unleashed.

I haven’t been this angry since Sydney lied to me about dating her now fiancée last year. I don’t even know this girl but the fury I felt was real. I wanted to immerse her in all the pain and stress I’m feeling right now and drown her in it… let her see how it feels.

Oh and that’s not all. I start, hopefully, moving Friday, right? The movers are coming to get the majority of the stuff on Monday. I’m hoping to be fully moved out by the end of Monday. Then August 7th I fly to Tampa to drive my eldest daughter Jessica (leaving the Air Force) and her two cats across the country to here, home.

I have no small amount of stress in my head. I don’t need a clueless child getting the cogs in my rickety machine tangled up and destroying the sensitive state that I’m perched in. And I go back to school in the fall. That’s super stressful for me. This time Kyle won’t be around to ground me. It will all be on me.

So after I unleashed my ineffective fury on Blank, I called Sydney so I could try to calm down. As usual she didn’t react the way I expected her to. She told me basically that she couldn’t believe that her powerful mom, who despite all the odds being against her, kept her kids and raised them and did it really well. She said that despite my Bipolar and other issues I kept them and their dad didn’t get to raise them. She was angry with me for letting someone who should have no power over me, have power over me like that. Where was the powerful woman she knew her mom was at? I got my ass handed to me.

It took me hours to go to sleep and then I over slept.

Hopefully the fury is now in remission. I fear the overload is not. I’ll have to be more careful. Stay on top of taking my meds and going to my appointments. I should tell my new counselor about the fury I suppose. I stopped walking Bailey when it started raining again a few weeks ago. Today was one of the few days we’ve been out. It was muggy.

I don’t know how Bailey did it, but she spotted something gross on the side of the highway and rolled in it without breaking stride. So gross.

So yeah, overload and fury road. I am so mindful of the overload. I feel the fury sticking inside me like my dog eating peanut butter. I’ve got to control myself.

I have no intention of apologizing to Blank today. I have nothing to apologize for. I suppose I could apologize for yelling, but she was yelling too. Little bitch. You don’t get to mess with my family. (Obviously there is a lot more to things than I’m saying here. This is just to give you an idea of how I’m doing.)

I think it’s time for me to have a private talk with Kyle about the differences between family and a girlfriend. The major difference to me is that when everyone walks away from you in the most desperate moments of your life, your family still has your back, still believes in you, still loves you. Family is always what you have left when all the others have gone. That’s how I raised him. The four of us, we are family. Jessica, Kyle, Sydney and I. Unbreakable.

Overload and fury road. Don’t mess with me Blank. I’ve got stuff going on and you don’t want to be the one the fury road dead ends at, especially now that I’ve had time to think things over and not just react emotionally, which is what I did.

I still feel the residue of Friday night’s fury. I feel it settling into my intellectual side, ready to spring into action in a more reasonable way. I’m not going to have a shouting match with a child. She’ll be respectful to me if she comes over with him today, or she’ll be invited to leave.

I’m so angry with her that I called my Mom, whom I sometimes fight with, and explained the situation to her. Kyle has also started caring less about his appearance since he moved in with her. He needs to care because he works with the public every day at work. He’s also started using credit now that he lives with her. He never even had a credit card until he moved in with Blank. Now he’s just bought the $800 Samsung S7 active. He was using a free texting phone and was proud of it before her. Now he owes on the phone, furniture and other things. He doesn’t even have a full-time job. When he lived here he never used credit. I know he has to live his own life and make his own mistakes. I’m not fine with that, but I accept it.

My family didn’t approve of my ex-husband. No one said anything to me about it. Taking the kids out of the equation, marrying him ruined my life. Would I have listened if my family had tried to talk to me about how they felt and what they saw before I married my ex? I don’t know for sure, but there’s a chance it might have. I’m going to give Kyle that chance. He’s too new at relationships to just let him be pulled about by a user. Blank is a user of other people. Also, she too has mental health issues. That alone makes me afraid for him. He deserves to live with a healthy partner. Not that a mental illness means it wouldn’t work, but look, I’m who he’s been living with. I don’t want him to have to keep dealing with issues like I have. He deserves freedom and joy.

She may come over with Kyle today when he comes over after work to help pack. I can’t reach the areas I need him to pack. All us females are under 5’5” and we need his long arms and legs. If she does I will not apologize for our phone call. I have nothing to apologize for. I will be polite. Beyond that, we’ll have to see.

Honey, the name the kids all call my Mom, is thinking she’ll “happen” to swing by while he’s here to check out how he’s doing. I think she’s going to scope out his hygiene. Since he’s moved in with her he isn’t showering everyday like he was. He gets greasy fast so that’s bad. Sydney, who works for the same company as Kyle does, says he looks bad at work. She says his cloths are sloppy and look old and like they fit someone else. She says he’s failed his last three secret shoppers. That’s grounds to be fired. When he still lived here he got several bonuses from the secret shoppers, not fails.

Maybe I’m focusing on Blank because I’m putting Siberia down on Tuesday. Maybe it’s the move or the idea of driving across the country that is making me sensitive to her. Maybe.

I’ll tell you this for certain. No one messes with my kids whether they’re adults or not.

I’ve always been honest with my kids. I see no reason to stop being honest with them now. The truth is, Blank provokes me to anger with the way she interacts with me and keeps my son from seeing me. I’ve heard the way she talks about the aunt she was living with for two years before the aunt kicked her out. She’s vicious. She interprets things to her advantage and then gets Kyle to agree with her….

Okay, I’ve vented in extreme here. I don’t recall doing this like this before. Well, it is a blog about my life and stress is a huge part of my life right now and she’s causing some of it. It’s time for me to recognize that I don’t have to let her get me upset and I don’t have to worry that I have to protect my son from her. I have to have faith that the good job I did raising him and his own personality and intelligence are enough to take care of himself.

Why did he have to sign a year-long lease? Sigh….

Bipolar – Learning How to Behave

/ Robin

Learning how to behave… I know that title might seem a bit odd or offensive, but hear me out. I grew up manifesting symptoms of Bipolar Disorder. My father may have been an undiagnosed bipolar person. Whatever he was he had the temper and anger of a demon. Between myself and with my father as an example I learned how to behave very badly. Somehow my Mom managed to teach me some good manners and I could put my polite hat on when I needed to, but much of the time I was just angry and depressed and it came out in my behavior and my attitude.

I behaved badly especially at home. In high school I wanted to be included in things but was too scared to. In college I got involved an everything I could. I’m not sure where that came from. I went to a Bible College and I behaved like I belonged there. When I graduated and left, the façade faded away and again I was that violently angry person inside. Unfortunately, I wasn’t polite or respectful especially to my family.

Now that I’m well medicated, am pretty healthy and have been in therapy for years I can look at myself and my current behavior and be more or less objective and honest with myself about my behavior. I’ve learned that I sometimes still struggle with in being courteous, being tactful, using the correct tone of voice, smiling, and having the appropriate facial expressions. Strange list, don’t you think? When I thought about what to write today I realized that these are things that directly impact how my Mom and I get along. She’s coming over today to help me pack my things for my move. I always try to prepare myself and think about how I’m going to act when I’m spending time with family because they are the ones I tend to act the most inappropriately with.

Courtesy – Dictionary.com begins its definitions of courtesy with the following two entries:

  1. excellence of manners or social conduct; polite behavior
  2. a courteous, respectful, or considerate act or expression.

Courtesy is nothing more than controlling my selfishness in all situations. It is respecting other people’s feelings. It is not, as I was prone to do, blurting out what I feel in my bipolar moments. It requires self-control. It is not always easy, especially when I am angry. Courtesy also requires self-awareness. It becomes more possible the more I have a positive attitude and it reflects quality of my goals and passions. The more I devote myself to those the more my behavior moves in line with their essential quality.

Tact – There is a right time for everything and a wrong time for everything. In this case I’m talking about my historical behavior of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Today I will be testing myself on whether or not I’m able to be courteous and speak with tact while spending time with my long-suffering Mom. I have been known to speak out of turn, speak in antagonistic tones, and interrupt her when she is speaking. I have been known to regularly question the soundness of her opinions and comment on any mistake she might make in texting or speaking.

While I am doing well I have no excuse to continue to behave in this manner. I’ve put in a lot of work on myself and this is a simple test for how good I’m doing. Can I keep my mouth shut unless I’m going to say something nice to her today?

Tone of Voice – There is something that we use to express our personality every time we speak and that is our tone of voice. If we say one thing, but our tone of voice says something different, we will be conveying something other than what we might intend to say. When I speak with my mother and I’m behaving badly my tone of voice is the first place it is evident. If I say something to her in a disrespectful tone of voice, but say something I think is respectful you can bet she won’t think I’m being respectful. She’ll probably be hurt that her daughter is speaking to her in such an unloving manner. Bipolar Disorder is not naturally conducive to good behavior.

Smiling – Smiling is much the same as tone of voice. In fact, if you are smiling when you say something it will be heard in what you say. When I’m feeling stressed out and angry it is very difficult to smile. But smiling is something I can control and I can do even when I don’t feel like I can say anything polite. My objective with my Mom today is to smile and be respectful and thankful that she’s taking time to help me. I don’t deserve the help. She’s doing it because she loves me. She still loves me after all the long years of bad behavior on my part.

Facial Expressions – Smiling is obviously one of the facial expressions I’ll want to use if I want to improve my relations with my Mom and other people. I can’t count how many times I’ve gotten into fights because of someone’s facial expression and what I perceive as their tone of voice. I react to facial expressions even if words are absent. Worse, I don’t control my own facial expressions.

If I really appreciate my Mom’s help today, my smile should reach to my eyes and be evident in my tone of voice. I should be tactful and not insult her if we don’t understand what the other is saying. I should be polite and respectful.

Sometimes I have to take a step back and examine my behavior to see if it lines up with who I’m trying to make myself to be or if it is more along the lines of the behavior I’ve tried so hard to leave behind.

I have no delusions that I will behave appropriately in all situations. I’m still human and I still have a mood disorder. It can be hard or impossible to smile when you are really on the down side of darkness. It’s okay.

Do the things you need to do to be healthly and stable again. When you cycle back up you will still have this knowledge you have gained about yourself and how to interact with your world. Take your meds as prescribed, go see your counselor when you’re supposed to, see your doctor if you need to, reach out to others who know who you are and you can trust to support you, exercise and eat healthy meals. If it seems like you’re just going through the motions that’s okay. Those motions may just bring you back to a happier place sooner and bring joy to your life.

Today, I will behave.

{Later} It was a good day. I only snarled once.

Bipolar – Loosing Inspiration

/ Robin

Some days I don’t have a problem getting up… those days are rare. I’m so tired in the morning I feel like I’ve been woken up in the middle of the night and told I can’t go back to bed. I can’t sleep past 10 because my dog would explode. She likes to go out at 9. Sometimes I can’t even get her off the sofa to get her to go outside. I wonder if I affect her sometimes. She’s supposed to be my therapy dog. I’m not supposed to be her downer human.

I’ve done allot of things that have distracted me from my goals this last week or so (I’ve been watching a lot of TV). I feel like I need a nudge, a shot in the butt to get going. I wonder if my goals are really worth fighting for and if I can even reach them. I feel the hand of doubt around my heart.

It’s time to reset myself. I need to get my passion back.

What was it I was striving for? What was the mission of my life? What was the passion that urged me on every moment? I need to pause for a moment and consider things. Is my passion big enough to keep me in motion and motivated to work for it every day?

Today I’m working without enthusiasm. I’m going about my work with words supported by unshakable faith in their message, but without my heart slamming in my chest demanding that I drive forward with great energy.

I’m searching back in my mind. I’m realizing I should have made the Enthusiasm notebook I had thought about making. I think I’ll do that next time I’m really enthusiastic. I’ll make a notebook with my definite purpose (my passion and goal) and the things that really make me enthusiastic. That way the next time I’m feeling like this, I can reference it and not be stuck mired in the place I’m in today… in neutral with no forward inertia.

Remember.

Remember what I’ve been fighting for.

Having goals and ambitions and having an illness like Bipolar Disorder makes my days hard. The illness whispers to me to blink a few times and let my guard down, to let the illness have its way with me. But I don’t want to do that.

I won’t do that.

(Previously published in The Etiquette of Madness)

Depression and Clear Thinking

/ Robin
Barney glasses and Tom_001

Sometimes I just gotta hang out.

Today depression is dancing around my peripheral vision trying to obscure my vision of my goals. It’s hard to keep going when I know the darkness is just behind one of the many doors in front of me. I know I have to choose which way to go, but I’m afraid I might send myself slipping down in the mud again. I’m feeling anxious.

I need to think clearly. Having my definite goal is helping… when I can remember that I have one. I live in the moment much of the time. That unfortunately means that planning goals out one year or five years can be pretty hard. I’m busy worrying about all the future things that can go wrong. There’s that. So I react in the moment while thinking about the now and the future. It’s too much.

I’m going to focus on myself and my day. I’ve written out my goals and I read them every morning I try to remember and to focus on them before I begin my day and every evening before bed, which is hard to do because I don’t remember to think about them by that time of the day.

I have ADHD, PTSD, and anxiety together with my big brain full of bipolar-ness. Somehow I’ve managed to set some goals like I’ve been talking about. I’m keeping my major life goal private but one of my shorter term goals is to blog consistently. If you’ve been reading me for very long you know I’m not good at being consistent. But there yah go.

Sometimes I feel like I need to wait till I have a disaster in order to have something to say but that’s so far from the truth. I have all my years of experience I can draw from to write about. If I want to write about a disaster all I have to do is pick one of my journals and pick a random page and read it. Ta da! Disaster.

That’s not who I want to be… someone who looks for her personal disasters to air to the world. There is so much else to talk about.

I’m having a hard day, as do we all. I’ve been thinking about thinking clearly a lot lately. I find anxiety and depression make it hard to think with any clarity. It’s like having clouds in my brain. I want to think about thinking clearly, I really do. Trying to pressure myself into doing something my brain doesn’t want to do this minute isn’t exactly productive. What it does is raise my anxiety level and I get more depressed. So what to do?

I’m going to reset my brain and try again later. I find that doing something totally different helps. I’d go for a walk with my dog Bailey, but it’s raining and I don’t feel like getting wet. I called my mother and told her that I was struggling. We chatted for a while. My dad passed away just over a year ago so she understands the unexplainable anxiety that can come out of nowhere and oppress me. I agreed to do something different for a while and I took a chill pill. That was hours ago. I’m feeling better now, but not great.

I talk about living with passion and searching for purpose in life to chase and dedicate one’s self to. I want you to know that I struggle just like you do. We all need to have purpose for our lives. It’s just that it’s hard to consider it when my thinking is so muddled.

Bipolar – Magnificent Obsession

/ Robin

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I believe that I, a person with Bipolar Disorder, can have a definite purpose in life. I believe although I have Bipolar Disorder I can have a main goal for my life and I believe I can reach it. I believe I have the ability to find a magnificent obsession, an overwhelming passion to dedicate my life to.

The illness ate year after year of my life, but now I understand that it doesn’t have to get a free pass to destroying me. I say this although I suffered for years of feeling like I was being ravaged from within. I can remember doing things, thinking things, and feeling emotions that were bipolar even when I was a young teen.

My poor mom. I was a devil to live with growing up. My depression often expressed itself as vicious anger. She tried to help me. She knew something was wrong. Some of the things she tried included counseling, religion, hypnotism, and sending me to live with relatives for the summer hoping that they could get through to me. Nothing helped. I once tried to kill my brother by bouncing on his chest till he turned purple. I only stopped because I knew that I would get in trouble if I actually killed him.

I knew something was terribly wrong with me. In high school I started actively searching to help myself I started going to church and there began chasing hard after God for the next 25 years. During my most devoted years I attended a Bible college and earned a bachelor’s degree.

Still, I suffered.

Many of my symptoms of bipolar disorder presented looking very much like sin. I couldn’t stop being bipolar and I couldn’t stop the “sinning”. No one knew I was sick and even if they had, I don’t believe they had the tools to help me. At one point some of the missionary staff tried to cast demons out of me.

Years later when I was a single mom and had left religion far behind me I no longer felt like a condemned sinner. Having that weight lifted off my shoulders did a lot to enable me to get out from under some of the self-created depression and condemnation. I had been obsessed with trying to stop sinning and all I succeeded in doing was make my condition worse.

I suffered and slowly died inside as I impacted my three young children with the violence of my inner turmoil. I said things, I threw things… I did a lot of things I wish they had never experienced.

I learned about success teacher Tony Robbins on an infomercial and began on my quest to be successful. I hoped that “success” would give me the strength to not give in to the urges of my illness. I thought that if I could be successful, I could be in control of myself. If people could use these principles to get rich, maybe I could use them to be successful in controlling my bipolar. I ordered the material he was selling and set to work enthusiastically doing the 30-day program.

Something amazing happened to me while I was going through the program: I learned how to think before I reacted and I learned I could preserver when I failed and I could try again. I learned to never accept defeat. I learned I could choose how I wanted to behave and I could actually behave that way. I was able to change the way I thought about myself, who I was and what my future might hold. I learned to have hope.

I’ve worked for years to follow certain success principles. I’d go for long periods of time when I forgot about them especially when I was depressed. The illness is still with me, my companion for life.

Today, I believe I’m successful. I’m doing what I love every day. I’ve taken the additional success materials of Napoleon Hill and Clement Stone and found that I could have a purpose for my life, regardless of who I am, and I found principles to help me achieve it.

These principles help me get up in the morning and do things that I know will fight my depression, my mania and all that lay between so that I can function and keep chasing my goals and be successful. I refuse to lose to my illness. I may have setbacks when the illness does overtake me and I will tell you that for many years I lost the fight against it and realistically I will probably have times when I feel I’ve lost to it in the future. Right now, I’m taking my life back. That’s why I blog. It is one way I’m taking back my life back.

I still have to take chill pills daily along with all my other meds. I’m not anywhere near perfect or even functioning at my best. But, when the hill has been climbed and I’m back among the living I still have my purpose to drive me. I’d like to say it’s a reason I get up in the mornings, but I’m not there yet. Yet.

I have a magnificent obsession I’m focused upon. I have goals and dreams that I am working on so that they will come true. I believe I can be even more successful than I can possibly understand today.

I have Bipolar Disorder and I’m amazing.