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...
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