The Ebb and Flow

For me, bipolar is a lot like a big island coastline, a small island coastline, and a bit of ocean between the two. The goal much of the time is to get to the other island without any boats, any aircraft - just swimming there. Now, the waves can be strong and attempt to push you right back to where you came from. Sometimes, fighting the waves, you wonder if it's really worth the effort or if you should just turn back and be content with the little island you came from. On the little island, you're much more alone, but it's land. That big island holds all of the opportunity, one could reason, and all you have to do is swim a little ways against the rugged waves.

It's not easy being tossed back and forth like a helpless rag doll. And this back and forth motion can apply to so many things. For me, indecision, opinions, beliefs, goals, likes and dislikes, interests, lifestyle, progression and retrogression, and many, many more... It's very easy for me to counteract myself through this being tossed around, trying to go in one direction and then being pushed in another, or going along with the waves. And then once you get onto that bigger island, it's not what you thought it would be... Your little island was comfortable, had no dangerous animals, had no great cliffs to fall off of... You're alone and driven crazy by your loneliness, but if it weren't for yourself, it would be exceptionally underwhelming. That big island, however, is the opposite. You're out of yourself and suddenly surrounded by something much larger than yourself. There's a population to keep you company, resources, but there are massive cliffs to fall off of, vicious predators who'll eat you alive... You regain your sanity, but you just trade one danger for another.

Perhaps if you could go back to your small island, lonely as it may be, but bring some of the resources back from the larger island. You get yourself a little boat, some food, tools, and goods, and you travel back to that little island. By doing so, you become internal again, but things are a bit better. You have the boat - a safety net - so that you can go back to the island whenever need be. The journey doesn't have to be so brutal, anymore, as you don't have to swim against those crashing waves each time. When the loneliness becomes too much, you can get the company that you need for a little while and then go back to the comfort of your home, where you came from.

The boat would essentially be meds in this metaphor. By using the 'boat' to go to the big island, you return to the harshness of sanity. By using the 'boat' to go back to the small island, you return to the paradoxically comfortable and unbearable insanity. It's difficult to bear either one, but with each one comes some kind of benefit, as well as its own set of difficulties. With sanity come tools, stability, but also the harshness of reality, intimidation, anxiety, and external struggles. With insanity comes unique outlooks, a paradoxical security, tools few people have, but also loneliness, a lack of interpersonal relationships, and instability.

My mom remembered my last psychiatrist saying how most people in my current age group (older teen to 20s) most commonly stop taking their meds. But my reasoning for wanting to stop taking my mood stabilisers and anti-psychotics is different. Most of those people want to stop taking their meds because they think they're 'cured.' They feel better because of the meds and think they don't need them anymore, while they're usually quite wrong. Once they go off of their meds, they sink back into their pre-med state and fall into instability once again. The difference here is that I'm actually discontent with the stability my meds have brought me. I crave instability, and know that I'll probably never be 'cured.' Instead of wanting to drop my meds because of a misconception, I want to dive head first into the nasty, gritty, grotesquerie that is the reality of insanity. But I don't want to do it completely blind. I want to go in with the things that I've picked up on in my time spent with sanity, go in with new strategies and tools.

I won't be that scared little kid who had no idea what hit him, who he was, or even what he was. I'm quite clear on that, now, even if it's fuzzy. I know that a dire lack of sleep for the coarse of two to three years was probably a likely cause for most of my worst problems before I was on meds, so I want to maintain sleep with as little mind-altering medication as possible. I don't want to be shaped into something I'm not naturally. Anti-psychotics and moods stabilisers were like tactical nukes followed by an insurgency - 'peacekeepers' - who obliterated anything that could've even potentially caused a threat, and in itself created a contradictory instability in ultimate stability. Humans aren't meant for such things. Order can only exist with chaos, and trying to remove all of the chaos in the world could only remove all of the order, as well. But, because this isn't truly possible, ultimate order would simply create an eruption of chaos. Better to balance the two out than to try and force one completely over the other. Through insanity, sanity. After all, reality is relative.

As I said, reality is relative, and not everyone's reality is the same as mine. Some people get on meds and never even think about turning back. Some people find meds to be a miracle, even if it took great amounts of tinkering and experimenting to finally end up at that point. I'm not saying that everyone who is on meds - particularly those for mental illness - should just stop. Some people literally need meds to live. And I want to keep meds available if I do need to get back on them again, primarily as a safety net. Who knows - I might go off of my meds for a week or two and find myself needing to get back on them. Brain chemistry is a tricky, fickle thing. Even the minutest change in brain chemistry can send a person spiralling toward their demise. Perhaps I'll even go back and forth between being on meds and off meds, weathering only so much before returning to the relative order, simplicity, and safety of meds, but then returning back to the chaos after having gotten my footing once again. I want to play it by ear. Life, it seems, is really just one big experiment for me. I'm a Petri dish of human bizarreness, constantly going through trial and error in an attempt to 'get it right.'

Well, time to sleep and rest this... strange, strange mind of mine.

A Lost Part

I often say that I don't remember much. That simple statement actually can go far; while I do have a lot of forgetfulness anywhere from long-term to just a few seconds ago, it can also span simply whole periods of my life. I'm finding this to be more and more partially true. Why is it not wholly true? I'm finding my brain has these massive reserves of memories, stored in abundance, but largely locked away. Anything can trigger a memory. I might watch a show with a schizophrenic character talking to a figment of his imagination, and I'll be warped back in time to a memory I didn't even know I had of a similar event, where I was talking to my very own figment of my imagination. I might smell an incense burning while in a dark room and be warped back to a time when I was laying on my bed in another house, incense burning, lights off, body spread across the mattress, crying and lonely, the mini-fountain on the desk gurgling and gasping like a fish out of water. That last memory is an example of memories that I'm brought back to enough that it becomes more or less ingrained in my mind. Suddenly, a forgotten moment can be a moment I can never forget, even after years of having forgotten.

I started watching a show called Perception. For those who don't know what Perception is, Wikipedia sums it up as:

Dr. Daniel Pierce, a talented but eccentric neuropsychiatrist, is enlisted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to assist in solving some of its most complex cases in Chicago. Dr. Pierce works closely with Special Agent Kate Moretti, a former student who recruited him to work with the FBI. Also on the team are Max Lewicki, Dr. Pierce's teaching assistant and Natalie Vincent, his best friend.

The main character, Daniel Pierce, also has paranoid schizophrenia, which is the source of his interest in neuropsychiatry.

Daniel isn't on meds and has vivid hallucinations, primarily in the form of other, imaginary people whom he even converses with. These hallucinations often guide him to conclusions and truths that most would overlook. He has his problems, certainly, but he's functioning... He shows symptoms and has episodes, but he's functioning. His life, fiction or not, is exactly what I want for myself. To be a neuropsychiatrist lecturing at a college, appreciated for your unique, eccentric mind? That sounds like heaven to me. Perhaps the path getting there isn't so heavenly, as that's often where I meet my first and greatest roadblocks. For me, maintenance isn't even really an issue because I haven't gotten to any point to maintain - I've been unable to travel the path to somewhere, someplace, that I would need to maintain.

More and more, memories started popping up. It was stunning to me what that show could dredge up each episode. By the forth episode, I was welling up with tears, thinking about how dissatisfied I am with my life and how I feel like I lost, or gave up, a large part of me. Since the first day I woke up after taking meds for the first time, I felt an emptiness. I convinced myself that, with time, I'd get used to it and the feeling of emptiness would go away. I was right, for the most part. I did get used to my 'new life,' but I also started to forget my old one. When memories would (seemingly) randomly appear in my mind, I'd feel that emptiness all over again, as well as an immense, overwhelming feeling of longing. I longed to get those pieces of me back again.

Now, just what pieces am I talking about? For one, my 8 other 'personalities' that guided me through some of my darkest days. They were compartmentalisations of my various facets and made me make more sense to myself. It was easier to comprehend myself when I was separated into bite-sized chunks. The second would be the imaginary world I invented in my head that I could retreat to whenever something to overwhelming happened. There were numerous areas in that world that each served different purposes. The third thing would be my delusions and hallucinations which inevitably brought me to greater enlightenment and spirituality - enlightenment and spirituality that, I might add, has been strained and dwindled since those delusions and hallucinations disappeared. I can see how one would simply see this as me saying, "I want my insanity back!" I wouldn't argue with that. But insanity is... subjective and debatable, as is sanity. I actually functions drastically better before I was on meds, no matter how much anguish and emotional pain I endured. The biggest difference between then and now is that I could endure more than an ounce of pain and anguish. Now, I can't endure anything even remotely 'challenging.'

With what I know now, after my respite of 'sanity,' and from 'insanity,' I've gained enlightenment with a more levelled head than before, a kind of enlightenment that I simply couldn't have gotten before I was on meds. I'm grateful for all of the years that I was more or less 'stable,' but I want to go back 'home' now. Think of my time on meds as studying abroad. Sure, it's a wonderful opportunity, and there are plenty of people who'd rather stay abroad, but I think most people would eventually want to just come back home, even if it's been years. Well, I think I really want to go back home, now. Perhaps if I were off anti-psychotics and mood stabilisers, I could maintain some kind of functionality, return to school, finish my education, and get a career and a life. Right now, no matter how 'comfortable' I might be in comparison, I'm simply at a standstill. I'm chained down and unable to face anything that could even slightly push me forward.

I certainly want to hold onto the facets of the new me. I don't want to simply return to merely who and what I was, as if rewinding.. Rather, I want to maintain who I am now, and regain who I was, and then meld them together. My symptoms have been resurfacing more and more (though not anywhere around hallucinations or delusions), and I no longer have my defence mechanisms - my self taught tools - to deal with them. I sacrificed those when I tried to get this silly little thing called 'sanity.' I sacrificed my only means of actually surviving in the long-term. People saw me as 'improved,' but it was merely a limbo for me to get some things sorted that I couldn't before. Well, that limbo is crumbling and becoming more and more useless. Keeping me in a limbo-like state without any of the benefits simply freezes me in place, unable to move forward.

Sleep was an extraordinarily rare commodity before I got on meds. If I could find a way to sleep without having to use mood stabilisers and anti-psychotics, I think I'd be just golden. Sure, I'd open the floodgates, let in the monsoons, the hurricanes and tsunamis, but I'd actually be able to weather them. As I am now, I couldn't weather a mild drizzle! I'd be miserable, but I've always been miserable, so is that really a negative? Usually, when people rise up and know peace, they dread the thought of going back to that lower chaos they knew for their whole life before. I'm not usual, and that's not how I am. I see new, better, greater things and scoff at them, preferring my older, familiar but much lower quality things. I suppose that's how I am in life in general. I'd rather dwell in the dark, muddy depths than the bright, clean heights.

I need to talk to my NP and primary doctor... try to figure these things out.

Blissful Ignorance

I've been realising more and more how easily I note both in my mind and to others (albeit, primarily people online) when I seem to be slipping into a mood of one sort or another. For better or worse, I seem to be able to forecast the 'weather' well before it comes. I don't know whether to be excited or frightened. Imagine knowing an enemy inside and out. You know your enemy better than yourself at this point, from their favorite haunts to their least favorite food. You know all of this because the sole purpose is to combat - eliminate - that individual. Isn't that something to be frightened of, whether or not it's necessary? Now, it's not a perfect metaphor, but it gives the general idea.

Knowing when a mood is coming on is becoming like second-nature to me. It's no longer painstaking, semi-accurate analysis - it's instinct. Just like how a great survivalist can just stop for a moment and smell the air hours before the storm and know it's coming, I can sense mood swings, shifts, and switches coming. Shifts are still more difficult to predict than swings, and switches are harder than shifts, but I've become fairly instinctive about them when I'm not too caught up in the current mood/state.

An example of this almost unintentionally honed instinct is: I begin to feel pressure in my head with a mild headache, can't concentrate, and become mildly sore all fairly early into my day; as the day goes on, it feels as though the world is getting paler for some reason, and the contrast seems either very low or very high (i.e. shadows and light spots don't contrast much, or shadows are very deep and light spots are very bright), and every sentence that comes out of my mouth seems to be bent in a mildly negative way, even when talking about something positive (it might come off as whining, irritability, or mild anger); at first I think I'm getting a cold - after all, I did have congestion, a runny nose, a headache, and body aches - and maybe I do have one, but there's something particular about the feeling, and despite cold being a more likely candidate, that feeling sways me to a different conclusion - a bout of depression is coming on. Surely enough, a few hours later, I begin slipping into a mild depression. Whether the depression gets better or worse is seemingly random and variable, and perhaps dependent on a multitude of impossible to predict circumstances (food intake, physical exhaustion, what shows or movies I watch, what music I listen to, events of the day, how much sleep I do or don't get [both can be beneficial or detrimental], conversations I have, if I go to the store or stay at home, if I lie down more, sit, stand, or walk, and on and on and on...) At any one time, I can know if I am or am not currently doing one of those things, and can monitor it, but at any one point, I can't know the whole course, except for afterwards.

One benefit that I do often get from mild bouts of depression is a strange tranquil lifeless weightlessness. It's a similar feeling I get after taking narcotic pain relievers that blends a sort of dreamy semi-wariness with an utter lifeless lethargy, sapped of everything - feelings, energy, thoughts, mental and physical capabilities - and, while each of those things (except for 'feelings') have become pretty constant now-a-days, with both the narcotics and certain bouts of mild depression here and there, it becomes even worse. Lethargy becomes lifelessness, trouble concentrating becomes confused and dazed, and mental and physical capabilities diminish appropriately.

I had a thought today... It was mostly provoked by thinking of my disability claim. I thought, 'I think there are three primary kinds of bipolar people - those who use illicit drugs just to function with the inevitable result of becoming totally incapacitated, those who don't take drugs and thus have little to no means of functions at any point of time, and thus are pretty much incapacitated anyway, and those who manage to function fine without illicit drugs. It might be a stark view, but that's how it seems to me. People with bipolar often take drugs to get through all of the pain, tumult, monotony, and chaos, and that improves their ability to function temporarily, but the drugs themselves eventually wear away at the person inside and out, and they fall into a hole that becomes extremely difficult to climb back out of. And then there are people with bipolar who somehow manage to raise themselves up without the use of illicit drugs (and who may or may not use pharmaceuticals), who can function properly, even if after years of mastery, and who can even appear... sane! And then there are people like me. People who don't use illicit drugs and who can't function. Sometimes I think that drugs of one fashion or another could be a way to function better, but my fear of risks in life outweighs my innate bipolar urge for risk taking. Whether that's a relief or a curse, I'm not sure. I know that, at any time, the holes I dig as I am now are much easier to get out of than the holes I'd dig when abusing drugs. I've never had addictive tendencies toward pharmaceuticals of any kind, which is lucky, and so I can seemingly take all the narcotics I need without becoming addicted (although, once again, my fear of risks outweighs this feeling of immunity to addiction so that I'm extremely cautious with all pharmaceuticals, regardless.)

I often say that I can understand drug abuse quite well and can be very sympathetic, if not empathetic, toward people who abuse drugs. Then again, I've also said that, before I got on meds, I felt like a druggy, with all of the paranoia, mood swings, lying, deceiving, and withholding, delusions, hallucinations, dissociation, fear and anger, depression and euphoria, nausea and 'creepy-crawly' feelings... and that's an incomplete list. It always felt easy to compare my years before meds like being on drugs and my years after meds like being clean. Being clean's no picnic, though. I'm most certainly not out of the woods - far from it. I still have many of the symptoms, just in drastically lesser degrees (still debilitating when all added up.) I have new problems accumulating, old problems evolving, I have what seems to be more problems getting worse than problems getting better. I no longer have the delusions or hallucinations, and have had only very rare instances of dissociation. And, of course, like many druggies worldwide (whether sober or not), I always have the urge, no matter how minute or strong, to go back to my drugs (only, in my case, that means go off my meds.) But don't the costs outweigh the gains? Yep. So why would I want to go back to what it was like before I got on meds? I'll answer that rhetorical question with another rhetorical question: why does any druggy crave to get back on drugs at any point in their life?

So, like most days now-a-days, I'm hyper-aware, and it feels like more of a pain than a benefit. I see everything happening while feeling utterly powerless to it - a spectator to my own life. I can analyse every detail of it, but to what benefit? I know all these things without being able to do anything about them. My problems just get progressively worse, and I see it with such clarity every step of the way. It'd seemingly be better to be blinded and unknowing of what's going on in my own mind (which, I'll admit, my mind can still seem alien even to me) than to be so aware. People say it's a step in the right direction, but take that step out of context, as if it's the entirety of the context on its own. Being aware is only beneficial when you know how to do something about what you're now aware of. Otherwise, it's best to remain blissfully ignorant. Oh, how I wish I could be blissfully ignorant...