Bipolar Disorder

Bipolar – Video Games I Play and Why

/ Robin

I play Diablo 3: Reaper of Souls and Forge of Empires. 

D3: RoS – on the X-box
Why? Because I like to shoot things … a lot. So I play on a pretty low setting … just so I can blow stuff up and shoot the rest of it.
I’ve been playing this game for years. Many years.

FoE: Free Browser Game
Why? Because this strategy MMO makes me slow down. A lot. And I have commitments to friends I’ve made (some have carried over to become real life friends) and my guildmates. Also, if I want to advance I have to think. You know, strategically.
I’ve been playing this game for about a year and a half.
Interested in playing? Go HERE

I have agression (read anger, temper tantrum, irritation, yelling, “tossing” things issues occasionally…). I find playing both these games helps me a great deal.

I see my med provider tomorrow. I have a cunning plan to aid in my “stability” and questions about possibly increasing my dosage of a medication.

Hmmm… I’m trying to find a way to learn to add biofeed back to my regiment of strategies (there’s that word again) to maintain and/or achieve a healthy lifestyle. Well, to achieve a healthier me. A healthier me makes for a healthier family. This is a huge motivation. I’m talking about both reasons. Also, my puppy will know when I’m coming and when I’m going. Presently she comes when I sneeze. Yes, for real.

Bipolar – PRIDE

/ Robin

You I’ve found that my depression tends to cut off my ability to experience and to recognize pride in my kids and myself. Never mind actually saying anything about it to them… when I realize what seems like to late that I should have said something encouraging to them… I freeze.  It sucks to have your kid come home and tell you how proud a teacher or counselor is off them. It sucks when you didn’t know you should have been proud of them.

Oh I realize we can’t know everything that’s going on with them,  but come on!  “Pay attention!” I said to myself.

The last two days I’ve been paying attention to my youngist, Sydney.  She’s in Running start and taking classes at the community college (TCC) and SOTA (School of the Arts) and was hired by the business she interned for AND today was made coordinator the the students, businesses and screening… and placing the new interns along with recruiting new interns.

WOW right? I don’t yet know how it will all work out but her brother and I are going to give her as much support as we can.

This morning I was so positive. I believed I could complete all the projects I’ve started over the last 15 years. They’re good projects and worthy of my hard work to complete them.

Then I picked up Sydney after my physical therapy (PT) on my lower back. I picked her up and it seemed to me that she again shot some things I told her I was thinking about in the face.

I crumpled. My amazing up beat attitude and hard work I’d done all day left me and I was filled with anger and resentment.

Stay tuned and I’ll share with you in my next letter what happened. It was a humdinger.

Good night my friends. Talk to you real soon.

Posted from WordPress for Android

Sydney, squinting, at the lake 2014

I’m so proud!

Bipolar – PENS & Oxycodone

/ Robin

I love pens. I really, really want to get one of those very expensive jobbies. I saw some in a gift boutique downtown Wednesday afternoon. They were 2013 models and at a bargain 50% off the normal $450 and $300. Oiy! Maybe not today. I’d love to get one for myself and one for my eldest daughter. We both love to write.

Writing can be a passionate thing. It is with me. Always with me I’m investing something of myself when I write whether it’s something blatantly obviously personal or if it’s something going on in my head that I want to talk about.

Right now I want to say something that I think is very important so sit up and read carefully. I’m putting this in terms of applying to myself so I know this from personal experience.

I have chronic pain. I have something wrong with my L4 and L5 disks, degenerative disks all the length of my spine, osteoarthritis, and fibromyalgia. I have a twice replaced right knee (replaced twice in two years, the first time it didn’t work) known as a TKR. I am 51 years old and I must say I do not appreciate needing to go to a pain management specialist and taking narcotics… every day.

I’ve been having what i can only label as nightmares now that I’m taking closer to the prescribed amount each day. (I also take Tramadol but that gives me migraines after a few days use). I don’t normally have nightmares. I was having trouble discerning reality fro dream when I would wake up in the morning.

Tonight I woke after another “nightmare” and remember something quite startling. When I was “incarcerated” in a facility to recover for my TKR the second time because my parents were moving and my kids wouldn’t be around to care for me giving me meds and such. It was a horrible experience. Besides generally feeling like I was incarcerated I was on Oxycodone at my maximum dosage every single time I could take it. The staff were only too happy to let me have it.

Unfortunately I had several nights in which I had terrifying and convincing hallucinations. It has taken me a long time to admit they didn’t really happen. Add to that, that I don’t remember my eldest daughter calling me daily from the MacDill Air Force base where she works as an air traffic controler. We live across the country from each other and that eats at my heart. We’ve always been close and the distance is difficult. But I don’t remember her calls and I know that bothers her. She took care of me during my first recovery and had to go through my even having two blood clots below my surgical knee. That was also a nightmare.

Last night and tonight I’ve been about at the level of Oxycodone that I was at in the rehabilitation center (read: nursing home) and I’ve started having hallucinations, not nightmares.

I suspect my use of pain medications is on the way down. We’ve tried a number of things and nothing seems to help.

I have an idea that I am sure will help. Ever hear of neuroplasticity? I’m sure you’ve heard of Luminosity, that’ s neuroplasticity. For me, this will mean using mindfulness to “remap” my brain and in doing so enable my actual brain structure to interpret pain differently. It won’t seem painful to me.  I guess I could put it like that without going into detail right now. I will soon though.

Neuroplasticity is becoming my key to dealing with my much of my troubles. Think of it, how awesome it will be to control my chronic pain, Bipolar, FM and OA… at least to a degree. Many advanced meditation practitioners are known to change their brains in a manner like the mindfulness I’ve mentioned.

Mindfulness. Neuroplasticity. How great to have the possibility of using these disciplines to help myself!

I’m not likely to be drug free… but I’ll get as far as I can.

I’ll talk about Mindfulness and Neuroplasticity in depth soon. They are very important disciplines that science backs up. I mean they are both proven scientifically to work in the areas I need. They impact many other things too.  After all, they are not confined to “topics” the brain considers. They do however, change the brain in ways we cannot comprehend considering the vast expanse, the last frontier as they say. At night I’ve taken to listening to Pandora. I searched and found a Mindfulness station to listen through the night. It’s playing right now. I finally decided to subscribe. Know why? The commercials were scaring me as I slept. Ew.

Watch your consumption of drugs like Oxycodone. You could have side affects you would think would anticipate.

Be cautious. Be ever vigilant.

Catch you later.I’m trying to stay awake for a while. Those hallucinations were getting very weird. Scary.

Robin

Weird Parenting – I’m Eclectic and Bipolar

/ Robin

I’m eclectic… I get it from my brain. Honest.

Back to being a pissy parent. We all have our pissy moments right? Ask your kids. If you allow them to be honest I’d guess they’ll say you are (sometimes). I am. Remember? But what next?

I can’t tell you how to be a great parent. I don’t think there is a cookie cutter version of the “perfect parent”. What I will do is share some of myself and my life; our family life. I’ll share some of the interesting (read… weird) things I’ve done in my journey and efforts to be a great parent. That was always my goal. I never wanted or want to be a good parent. I only and always want to be an excellent, amazing, great parent. That’s all.

One of the things I’ve found to be most interesting and thankfully very workable starts with me. I’m super massively curiously. My kids sometimes think I’m too curious. I want to know all about so many things. As a Bipolar parent this can come in handy. When I’m functioning pretty well (not screaming over “spilt milk”) and can stand on my own and all by myself I love to do weird things with the kids.

We live about an hour from Mt. Rainier National Park. It is an amazing park. I could pick the kids up at school and be up at Paradise in under two hours. We ate lunch or a snack out of the back of the truck (car, after the Explorer was repossessed). The very easiest food for me to pack, and one that doesn’t cost much, was to get a brick of cheese (not a giant one), a tube of summer sausage, crackers, 2 pops for each of us, bottled water, and some candy. Oh, and my pocket knife, to slice the cheese and sausage.

We have been poor, very poor, since any of my kids can remember. I have always hated that and resented everyone, including myself, for it. I never thought it was fair. But that was just how I “felt”. As I learned and grew I’ve come to understand that at this point in life it just is what it is. There isn’t any sense beating myself over the head about it or raging at family members who have $.

The thing was I wanted to find things for us to do as a family. I wanted them to see we are family and we will always be here for each other. I started with the fun things like taking off on spur of the moment wild trips to the mountain. None of their friends could say they did that.

What am I saying to you? I’m saying this: my mind wanders hither and thither all the time. Like Alice said, “I think about 6 impossible things before breakfast.” That’s always been me. I was stuck in depression much of the kids’ childhoods… growing years… before high school. I really fought myself to do the things that I knew were right. Providing a fun and fast trip to get us all outdoors in some of the most beautiful places in the world. (I mean that every place we stopped for pictures or to explore or just anything, that individual spot was fun at that time. That moment.

I’m curious, remember? Shaking off depression and plunging into a floating maniac free fall. Okay. Maybe calling it a rocket which takes off likety-split. The internet was just reaching survivable speeds for mania driven for me. My brain spun and smoked constantly as I devoured every bit of information on anything that caught my fancy… day or night.

This obsession turned out to make our trips interesting as well as fun. Information, you know, the stuff that can grow our brains to be smarter? Yeah, I had a lot of that.

I had just one problem. Only one of my three kids could give a hoot. The one that did wasn’t anywhere near as interested in information as I am and we diverge all the time. But we do both like to learn about things we’re interested in. She reads. Not so with the other two. They saw their out of control mom buy 100’s of books and devour many of them. Books lived in our small duplex more than we people did. They don’t actually like to read just for the love of reading.

Mom has all these books. Many are about how to help myself be successful in life and finances. They saw neither of those oh so important things happen when I brought a new book home or printed reams of information from cool websites. Obviously, books aren’t great. Words aren’t great. They don’t even work. (I’m not really sure what that means, but I think you get my drift.)

My attention wanders constantly. I have ADHD and am Bipolar type 1. My brain hears this instruction incessantly: go… go… go… go… go… GO!!!!

Keeping kids happy… my books did and do help me do that. They give me a place to take my mind to where I can be quite and stop talking for a time. They revel in the silence. Books give me ideas. A LOT of ideas. Running the kids to the mountain is one of my greatest ideas for my young, single mom, Bipolar, ADHD, poor family. We sang. We laughed. We ate fun food. We played in the snow without snow cloths (never enough money to get warm cloths for playing in snow).

I forgot what I was saying again. I started what I want to tell you about in my next letter. Nope, that’s gone too. Hold on… think… relax… switch the TV to mute… I want to tell you more about these sudden trips next time. I’ll tell you about Tarzan yells, deer, mountainside museums, rocks, singing country music, lakes, mud slides and fell trees across the road. And I must not forget the movie in the woods after dark. Cheap, fun, fast trips.

You know what our little trips did for me? I got excited thinking about going, about treating the kids to something terrific. That boosted my morale and pleased me. I even smiled. I miss those trips. Remind me to tell you why we don’t go anymore.

Point? getting my hiney up and doing things just so I could surprise the kids always pulled me up from the darkness. I didn’t have a choice.

Thought followed by action… this is a secret weapon I use as often as I remember to… help me be more like me.

And now I must say good night my friends. I think I’ll play some nature sounds with soft music on YouTube from the playlist I made just for that purpose. Lest you think I need to fill the quite void of no talking I must share with you one more little interesting thing.

Someone in the near area is having a party. The sounds of vehicles on the highway (half a mile away) periodically are drowned by crazy laughing.  Sounds like something from haunted woods. Wish I could make out what they say. Wait… it’s the ass. You know, the ass down the road. The one that resembles a pony. He makes his ass sound. Then the creepy laughing. Then back to the highway. Yeah, TV is getting unmuted.

Till next time… Wait, I thought of something else. Thank you to those of you who have taken time to write notes to me. I love hearing from you. Please write me notes, post comments and even share my letters to you as often as you like. If you’re a parent and Bipolar you and I have a lot in common. So share, comment and tell people you know who might find Redux (this blog) amusing or helpful.

Signing off till next time.

Robin

P.S. I didn’t even apologize for jumping around today. I’m not even going to go back and make it more organized. You get the words today the way they prompted me to put them down. Uh… in. In my Chrome. Never mind that. Pass it on my friends. And keep writing.

 

I Am a Bipolar Parent – Pissy

/ Robin

Hi everyone.

I chose the title “I am a Bipolar Parent – Pissy” because while BP is what I am, who I am, what I have, whatever, I am a parent first.

I am a divorced and still single BP woman. I am Type 1 (the messy type) and I exist in the mixed state perpetually. When not being a good and balanced mom, I’m super pissy. When I’m depressed and throwing things or want to get off the world and I’m manic and talk forever and shout a lot.

I’ve raised my children (I’ve counted them… there are three) alone and unemployed. I’ve stay unemployed because I simply couldn’t handle working. I’ve never lasted more than a year in any job. I did have my own company for a while. It was wonderful and I loved it. I was more manic than depressed at that time so I was able to crush all adversity into dust.

People around me kept telling mi I was a great parent. Now, years later, I look back and am broken hearted. I see that I wasn’t an amazing parent. I see what damage I’ve done to my babies who are now 22, 19 and 17. My youngest especially has explained to me through who she believes she is and remembers from her childhood, that I pulled them into my emotional and mental poverty with her especially being damaged.

Damaged. I suppose I wasn’t such a great parent. I was relatively stable (I’m lying) during the first two kids’ early years. When it came to my youngest I see that I was consumed by my business. It made me feel alive for the first time in years. Unfortunately, I left her in the dust of my being consumed. She’s had a hard time.

My baby says she’s been raised in a shit hole and feels like others have “families” while she did not. Their father has been out of the picture for most of her life. That, has been his choice. It gave her a primary target for her anger, her hatred.

Now I am learning so many things about her and what she remembers. She doesn’t remember any good times.

I remember the good times. So do the older too. She feels . . . cheated I think.

I’ll tell you more about this soon. Instead of lamenting all my woes of being a crappy mom, I’m going to tell you how I became a good mom. Maybe even a great mom. I became a “weird parent”. Check back soon to see what I mean.