Desires

I suppose I have horrendously unrealistic desires when it comes to my mood disorder and anxiety. I want to be able to freely and readily swing between highs and lows, but I don’t want to be obligated or responsible for anything during those times. I want to meet people, but I don’t want to do the work of going out into the world to do so – I’d rather be set up with someone and… just hope we mesh well. I want to be able to feel free to cry if I get emotional and laugh insanely when I’m emotionally high without feeling like I’m being judged. I want to be stable and unstable at my very whim. I want to be able to manually open the flood gates (tears), because – otherwise – they’re habitually blocked. I want to be able to just… go to sleep when I feel sleepy, and feel sleepy, like a normal person, instead of needing a chemically induced sleep every night. I forgot a long time ago what natural sleep feels like.

Some of these might not seem so crazy to certain individuals, while some of these might seem ridiculous. I can’t really predict who would think what. I can understand these desires being unrealistic, but they’re desires – not necessarily what I will or can get. I guess, to sum it up, I want control… even if that means a little bit of lack of control. I always imagine in my head how things should play out, with specific cues, like a movie version in my head. I can say that I cannot recall a single instance that has happened except for the ends of certain movies (I’ll admit, when no one’s looking, I can be a bit of a crier with films that hit home with me.)
 
I see these bipolar people on TV and movies, or hear stories about people with bipolar, and they sound so much closer to how I used to be. I mean, not many people get a number of coexisting psychoses in the form of different kinds of consistent and persistent delusions and hallucinations. That’s one reason an old therapist of mine and I had come to the same conclusion that I might have schizoaffective disorder with bipolar tendencies (in between bipolar and schizophrenia, though they are sometimes believed to be part of the same continuum.) Still, having been on a steady supply of antipsychotics for years and years, now – perhaps over a half dozen different kinds – I’ve been lacking that particular symptom. I had a love-hate relationship with my psychoses… I often miss them, but am often glad they aren’t around anymore. I guess if I could pick and choose my psychoses, I’d be just golden. There I go being unrealistic in my desires, as I obviously can’t be picky about what psychoses I do and don’t have.
 
And then there are my romantic desires… Love… wife… kids… Each and every day that goes by, I decrease my chances of ever finding those things because of my solitary, hermitic, anxiety-engulfed, anti-social, hypocritical day-to-day life lodged firmly in this house. And what if I happen to miraculously find any such person, and succeed with any such things? Would I just live a miserable, unfulfilling life? Would I feel inept and impotent? Would I be a horrible father? Would I still be too scared to even walk a few blocks away from the comfort of my house alone? I’m constantly pestered by these questions swirling in my head. The things I want could become so disastrous in my current state, or if my state got any worse. I then often think that, perhaps, dooming myself might be the only way to avert such disaster, assuming that I don’t improve. It’s not until I improve in the various other areas that my self-destructive tendencies really become relevant as more than a defence mechanism.
 
To be able to control what I feel and how I feel it… To be able to control how I deal with things in life… To be the master of my mind… Those are the things I truly want so badly. That’s what all of these desires really boil down to. I almost achieved a trance-like state during a shower at dawn. It was peaceful, relaxed, and utterly free of my problems. All the pain and anxiety and tiredness seemed to disappear. It felt almost like sleeping, but it wasn’t. All of my senses began to blur, but were ever-present. I was mindful of every one sensation, and yet they felt… not blocked, not dulled, but a particular kind of feeling that I’ve only really found in narcotics. You know that it’s there, but it’s drastically less taxing on you. This transcendent state was like a natural, mindful painkiller. If I could always achieve a state like that, I don’t know if it would be good or bad. Would I become like the guy on Office Space, or like a Buddhist monk? Or would I become like something else entirely?
 
My life has been like one giant experiment with no real conclusions. There’s been trial and error, with no ‘right way’ of doing things (but certainly plenty of wrong ways.) And, in this life, each trial and, usually inevitable, error takes months at a time, if not years, making the process painstakingly slow.