This article is very basic but has nuggets. My main complaint about it is that it says nothing about Depakote.
http://www.webmd.com/depression/how-different-antidepressants-work?page=3
Hope you enjoy it. 🙂
These earrings personify the bipolar experience for me. When I am manic, I am like the skeletor face and when I am depressed I am the personification of the drooping mask…even though we are required to wear masks in our day-to-day life I don’t know about you, but it is nearly impossible for me to wear a happy face in all arenas.
For the longest time I was reluctant to wear these earrings because I thought they were too weird and Aztec pagan, but recently I realized they are the perfect expression of my personality. Someone from outside could look at these and think they are weird or cool. But no one but myself will know what they truly signify. And I don’t know about you but sadly being bipolar is part of my identity.
I think, from DBT class and a lot of other blogs, that bipolar shouldn’t define a person. You can use your social and behavioral skills to mask it and not rock the boat for anyone else. But, right or wrong, being bipolar is part of who I am. I cannot escape from this, no matter how acceptably I behave; no matter what positive philosophy I adopt.
And I truly do believe that these positive philosophies are the way to go. Bipolar DOES NOT own you. But for my part, though it doesn’t own me, it is still a part of who I am and I do get sick of all the “positivity” and “cheerleading”. Does that make me a person who gives up? I don’t think so. Being aware is OK. It keeps a person ready to think a moment before reacting to something.
Because you are aware. Awareness isn’t a failing. Acknowledgement is not a failing. Acknowledgement is important and really the best way to help yourself.
Acknowledgement is not the same thing as characterizing oneself. I have been guilty of this. Acknowledgement does not give the disorder its power. Its power comes from characterizing yourself.
You are more than your bipolar disorder. But acknowledging it, even gaining personal power from the knowledge and experience, are good things, in my opinion as a person who has struggled with self-hatred and inferiority from this disease.
So I do like my earrings. They don’t mean the same thing to everyone.
Nothing does.
There is power in personal symbols.
this is a share off of Facebook.
I don’t know about myself
What to feel, what to think
I am lost in a miasma of self-doubt
self recrimination
and hibernation from all that is real
My head spins
and all seems jolly
and out of reach, inexplicably
I am on top of my game
and incapacitated
Oh, self-medication
it is a curse in satan’s clothing
I know satan is the Deciever
and yet I am comfortable in his embrace
I don’t want to be.
I know God is there waiting for me
it is a huge comfort to me
but my head, my soul still cry out
and won’t listen.
Five Trees
“On the sheltering hillside
where the fence has fallen
the great aspen and the great pine
stand tall together
like brothers
guarding
the tiny, frail sister between them
and the two younger pines
like cousins
stand watch behind them.”
This was the little verse I wrote two years ago, after I had buried my knife up at Ryman Creek, to help me find it again someday. This past Sunday was that day.
Sunday
“Three pine cones make a nest. Dry leaves and twigs a writhing mass caught in stasis, no doubt to be rearranged by the weather before my return.
Upon this hillside I tell myself, “To punish myself is to punish my family more.” I repeat it over and again.
But the urge to cut myself is like the urge to breathe, to scratch Zil’s itchy spot, to drink the living water from whom I seem to have banished myself…
Ritualized actions, I think. A scene from House comes to mind: ‘ritualized, you play the same Sara McLaughlin song over and over every time you do it . . . .’
So I make up a new ritual, even as my hand, almost against my will, prizes the Winchester knife out of my tight jeans pocket.
I dig a hole, imagining as I do the poetic elements for my future clues. I wrap the Winchester in the only protective shroud I have on my person. A fudge rounds wrapper. Then I secure it with oversized dandelion leaves and bind them with grass.
My son is watching me now, and playing with the dry, brown puffballs with their coffee-colored smoke. He gives me a knife and I carve my initials into the aspen: Interestingly, AT. I’d meant to put ATR but I am thinking of CStJude and I know I can’t put all that…the tolerant aspen chosen to stand guard over the Knife has given enough. So I forget the final ‘R.’
The knife I am using is a hunting knife of my son’s that has a bent point, making it difficult to carve and certainly to hunt with?
(clues for as we drive in) To the left of the road, a small root-clan of aspen reaches toward the road. The corrals are distant. The great aspen is only visible at its top. The brother trees look like a huge pine with an aspen wig on top of its head. This is just past the top of the entrance just after the road that has doubled ends, then I will look to the left for the reaching root-clan. Just past that on the hill stand the mighty pine/aspen twins.
-this task has been so absorbing that my mood has improved-”
All that is what I wrote two years ago in a small notebook that I take on hikes. It is not dated. I don’t remember what I was so upset about. Probably nothing tangible. But I was miserable and fatalistic and filled with the urge to self-harm. Now I am no longer in danger of cutting, and have not been in a long time. I would like to say not since that day, but honestly I cannot be sure.
Here are the five trees:
The five trees as approached from the side of the hill
And here are my initials, right where I left them:
and here is the knife, unburied, at the foot of the aspen:
…still cradled in its Fudge Rounds wrapper.
The heron is a significant bird.
When I’m left alone, there’s nothing to distract me. No creativity. It’s all gone again.
Sometimes it seems to just be buried beneath the surface or scratching away at a wall.
I can’t see the herons. The boundaries are closing about the lake, the world of the fish. Soon they will have nowhere to go and the herons will eat them.
Maybe the water that covers my soul is going away too, and my soul will flop struggling to the surface, stranded on the shore. Gasping not in death, but in awakening from a pool of death. And swallowed in the rebirth of a heron. I hope.
“I am angry enough to die.” – Jonah 4:9
I am like a bucking horse – I mean, a horse that bucks. Almost every horse bucks, eventually, during his or her life. Some are forgiven; some are not. I’m like one of our rescue horses, given to instantaneous bucking fits, no warning, just instant bronc mode. Sometimes though, I give warning, crow-hops, but in general, these warnings are ignored.
I figure I must live in a state of forgiveness for my bucking, or I would be shot or abandoned by now. Committed to an asylum or sent to the sale barn. Yet it doesn’t feel like I’m being forgiven. It feels like I am kicked and beaten every time I’m down. That I’m still here argues for forgiveness. These repeated beatings argue for unforgiveness.
Things begin to happen, but like my stories, they go nowhere. I need to be sent to a sale barn. A sale barn for useless, problem wives, to be auctioned off, packed into a truck, and taken away on a journey that will end in slaughter. Humane or inhumane matters not, since being stuck in this life is in itself inhumane.
Today, I hate being bipolar. Today, it seems bipolar is me, so I must hate myself and my life. I have tried and tried not to let bipolar get me down, but it’s apparently hopeless. Apparently, I am supposed to be grateful for my disease because it is teaching me so much about life – that would be useful to me if I didn’t have the disease, but as it is, such knowledge is useless!
Suicidal ideation was happening! I was so mad at hubby and frustrated with my earlier behavior that I wanted to pop a bullet into my brain, the very horror I had believed would never manifest again.
I would have gone past considering it, I think, if the family wouldn’t lose everything without my disability check. Or, if I didn’t owe them all better for having lived with and tolerated me and my disease for so long already. Or, if I didn’t owe God for dying for my sins. Or, if I didn’t care about ruining my children’s lives.
I cannot believe God tolerated Jonah’s anger and simply explained to him why it was unjustified. But he did. For that, God only deserves gratitude on the part of Jonah and of me.
If anyone remembers the Macro Manic Day post, you might have wondered if the car ever exploded.
Well, the good news is it hasn’t so far, and I’ve been forced to drive it only once since my “I will never drive this car again” vow.
Our car is so special. It is a red 1991 Jeep Cherokee. The parking brake doesn’t work. The cassette player is on the fritz. You can’t pick up any radio stations at all around here because the country station is so overpoweringly strong (and the antenna is not connected to the radio. Apparently, it will take a lot of money to fix that). The air conditioner and the cruise control are gone forever. Our right back passenger door got caved in in some accident and was replaced with a white one that doesn’t open from the outside. Some crack-pot body shop. The right rear plastic that covers the taillight is broken. My son has the light itself held onto the car by electrical tape. These are the little things.
The bigger things are the oil leak, between the main parts of the engine. This can only be fixed by pulling the engine. So we drive around with a can of oil in the car at all times and a terrible stench of oil burning on the engine. At all times.
Then there are the doors. They are falling off. The welds that hold the door hinges to the car are breaking. Well, the driver’s side one already completely broke. The professional welder said it was impossible to fix, that no weld would ever hold. So this other guy hubby ran into, who was an amateur welder and didn’t know it couldn’t be done, welded it back on. There is a wadded up plastic bag stuck between the place where the door closes on the little button that makes the car go beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep when the door is open, because the door doesn’t close right and without the wadded up piece of plastic, it would just go beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee all the time while we were driving it (but never get to that terminal p), and run the car battery down to nothing when it was not being driven.
So that weld’s getting ready to go again; we don’t dare open the door all the way. The passenger door is starting to go too. We can see where the weld is starting to fail.
And two nights ago, we discovered what was probably the cause of the horrible stench and smoke coming out of the steering column that day. Because, ta-da! the windshield wipers no longer work!
So driving it in the rain is going to be a challenge.
Now, whenever I have to drive somewhere (which I avoid whenever possible because it usually results in a social encounter of some kind), I take the newer vehicle, the 1993 green-and-white GMC pickup I like to call “Truckie,” and which our ubiquitous friend refers to as “the Jimmy,” which drives me completely bonkers because it is NOT A JIMMY and he pronounces it “Jyyemmy” which takes about 15 seconds to say–Now the “Jyyemmy” is special too, because its windshield is a spiderwork of cracks, the window washer fluid doesn’t work, there is no stereo or radio, and I can’t use the parking brake because the release is broken off. There is a thingy down there that I can access and pull towards me while pushing on the parking brake pedal, but the brake won’t release unless I let go of the parking brake pedal while my hand is under there pulling the thingy so the pedal almost always smashes my hand. It just got a supposedly new clutch (new until the mechanic spilled the beans by telling hubby, “you’ll think it’s a brand-new clutch”). It makes a horrible noise which hubby says is meaningless. It has no functional spare tire and even if it did we don’t have a lug wrench in it or a good spot to place a jack. This makes it extra scary to pull horses (it’s already scary enough)…Also, the passenger side rearview mirror is broken and held together by duct tape and one of the rear tail lights is missing, and worst of all, the seatbelt things that you snap the seatbelt into are BROKEN! all but one. So, for passengers to be buckled in, it is necessary to pull the passenger seatbelt across your lap, then feed the center seatbelt up through it, and then put the center belt down through the driver’s seatbelt, and push it into the latch. So when two or three people are in the truck, we are all dependent upon the center belt fed through the driver and passenger belts. From the outside, it looks like we are seatbelted, but I don’t know if the seatbelts would pass inspection were an officer to look inside. The one good thing that can be said for the GMC, which cannot be said for the Jeep, is that the heater works.
There. I don’t know if I’m manic, depressed, enraged, or trying to keep my mind off something else, but you are now informed about our cars. You’re welcome.
Sad to say, some days being bipolar is like being part of the game called “Minecraft” (or as we like to call it, “Mind Crap”). I feel right now like a “creeper”, shuffling along in perpetual anguish through a life with no ultimate destiny except to explode when I encounter people.
Ain’t it pitiful. Hah. At least the thought of this brings a smile to my face! 🙂
It turns out that yes, indeed, I am manic, very much so, and have been for a while now. Mania is not always a good thing, even though many of us are medicated to the point that it seems we are kept below the threshold of “normal” in terms of happiness and productivity. Thus we long for the mania to return, or even hypomania, for which I have wished repeatedly during my prolonged depressive periods.
My mania lately has taken a freaky form: Anxiety, right-brained reactivity and destructive impulsivity that has now resulted in me truly hurting someone and forever burning a bridge that was important to many people. I am filled with remorse, and many things, particularly horses, will be no longer enjoyed without that prick of sorrow and guilt that I have set myself up for with my actions taken in the throes of mania.
I have medicated myself rather heavily in order to accept the constant yelling I am getting from my hubby and myself right now. Everything I say is responded to by hubby as “you aren’t hearing a word I am saying,” and “it’s like talking to a rock!” and “Stop it” You are being ridiculous.” Ridiculous, ridiculous, ridiculous are all my concerns as I watch him doing what I believe to be further damage over the phone, and insisting that I abdicate what I feel is important responsibility without offering a different solution to take the place of my abdication. I wish he would stop it but there is nothing I can say that isn’t “ridiculous.” I also know he is trying to do helpful things that will lead to the solution of our current problems more productively than the things I did, in the hopes of keeping me out of the hospital again. God bless him!
So, thanks to my understanding doctor who has prescribed me some extra medication (extra risperidone and clonazepam) to help me react without anger or bitterness or dangerous breakdowns to these triggers, I am able to use the extra medicine she prescribed to enable me to control myself, namely, my tongue for the most part. I have little doubt that when the crisis is passed, I will be able to return to my normal tiny dosages, as I don’t like taking the refuge of extra medication. I would prefer to handle my crises with mindfulness, wise mind, essential oils, prayer and so forth. But now I need to feel as little emotion as possible or the anxiety would get out of control. Of course, it can also be argued that in this circumstance, anxiety and fear and crippling remorse are warranted and normal, too.
I am reminded of the words of Jesus, and I pray every day that he will help me guard my tongue. He said if a part of the body offends, then cut it off. Not sure if he was being literal or speaking in a parable. Sometimes I wish I could cut out my tongue. I feel it has caused me to do damage beyond forgiveness. I will never receive the forgiveness of the person I have hurt, but I know my heavenly Father will forgive me.
To be Christian about this for a moment: “I [God] live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit, to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite. I will not accuse forever, nor will I always be angry, for then the spirit of man would grow faint before me–the breath of man that I have created.” – Isaiah 57: 15-16
There is some spiritual help for me and for others who have done horrible things through the erroneous impulses that accompany mania. Deeds done while in the manic state should never be written off just to being manic. We should take responsibility for what we have done, for we have done these things.
There may have been one way in which my destructive impulses have worked out for good and that is what my husband reminds me of when he is being compassionate toward me, and it comforts me but only a little. How I wish for the good mania, the type that doesn’t result in craziness.
Yet I know too, that this will pass, just as I know my normal, functional times will pass, and that my depressive periods will pass. Everything passes and turns into something else with bipolar. You can count on not staying a certain way forever; there will always be a change, and sometimes for the better. Take encouragement from that. Remember to take a breath, mindfully, seeking wise mind to operate from. Hopefully wise mind will become a habit. It has not happened for me during my manic freakouts, but that does not mean I will not be able to achieve this with the help of the good Lord. Many others have succeeded at this and I know that I can too.
Liberate from convention and live with extraordinary intention
My journey from hell and back and back again with bipolar disorder
Something's got to give......
My Human Journey to God
Bluebell Ranch Sweden
through the darkness there is light
Tracking the Wild Horses of Spring Creek Basin
Siege of the Spirit 