Jargon

Maybe we are so accustomed to familiar jargon, we don’t recognize symptoms if they are described in other ways.

I was having some symptoms. I have been doing well for a long time and they frightened me. I was hearing my voice (not a hallucination) but it was repeating the same words over and over. Nothing scary, more like I was rehearsing lines.

I was also starting to mumble the words I was saying. I found that listening to music was good because I started saying the song lyrics and that was better.

I would try to explain this to friends, hoping they would sympathize, and maybe give me some tips to deal with it. Instead they would say things like, “Oh, I’ve done that before” and shrug it off like it was no big deal or “Maybe you are talking to yourself because you are lonely”.

Instead of helping I ended up frustrated, leaving wanting to bang my head against a wall. It was hard. I knew they were trying to be helpful and maybe normalize my experience, but I found it invalidating.

And the more anxious I would get, the worse the symptoms would get, the more anxious I would get and it snowballed. My psychiatrist seemed to understand what I meant and made some changes to my medication. Now, it is getting better and I am getting calmer and it gets better and the snowball melts.

Recently I saw another friend. I told her I hadn’t been doing well, some thoughts. She said “racing thoughts?” I thought, that is the closest thing to what I am trying to describe, so I said “yes”. Finally I found a friend who could somewhat understand.

Getting ahead of myself

I haven’t been able to work for over 10 years. Mostly because stress makes my symptoms worse. I have been thinking of attempting to work. I have sent out some resume’s and gone on interviews.

Those didn’t go so well, but I am still looking. I found an agency that places people with disabilities in jobs. The employer gets a tax break. I haven’t been very impressed with the company so far, but I haven’t seen any of the job leads.

But, I have been rolling the idea around in my head. Who will pick up the kids and do the things I do when I am around? Am I making a mistake? What if I can’t handle it? What can/can’t I do?
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What is fun?

Here I find myself, papers scattered around- my assignments and my notes. My thoughts feel like they are shuttering, I can’t understand this chapter, I am lost. And I feel scared.

It makes me stop. And I have to ask myself, what’s happened? It has been weeks… endless weeks of nonstop studying. I grew tired of doing research for my essay but the only other thing I could think of doing was another homework assignment (due in over a week).

And now I’m stuck. My brain doesn’t know what to do. I am too burnt out to write the essay but I am stuck on this physics chapter. The Ritalin I’ve been abusing is nagging at me to keep going. But I realize that some part of me is very weary.

The therapist applauds me for my determination, motivation, and hard work. Even when I suggested I might be hypomanic.
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Focus

I wake up and throw myself into rants about how I am irritated with a multitude of issues in my life that are all intersecting to make my day frustrating and uncertain.

After ranting for two hours to various people, I start studying. I am fixated trying to complete problem after problem with undying devotion. When I get stuck I force myself to turn my attention to what is more important- the assignments due tomorrow.

What should have been a half hour at best of work, turns into what feels like over an hour. I write an abstract for my lab report and spend an immense amount of time editing it until it is “perfect.”
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My Bipolar Face is Not MY Face.

It is Worldwide Bipolar Disorder day (okay so this post is a couple minutes past midnight, but close enough). From what I’ve gathered, we are supposed to show our faces.

But I will do no such thing. My anonymity is essential to my life.

I severely cut myself late November two years ago. I was rushed to the ER by my roommates where I was stitched back up. I was lucky I didn’t hit any major blood vessels. If you look close enough, you can see a large vessel right above the scar. But it was deep enough to see my tendon. At that time, I was in throes of some sort of mood chaos. I hadn’t been diagnosed with bipolar yet. I later found out that my therapist was desperately trying to contact my psychiatrist to get me off those medications immediately because they were making me worse.

Friends would come over for game night, which I didn’t participate in, but I did do my best to be as distracting as possible. I would get into these moods, where I’d laugh hysterically, ramble away. I’d lose myself. I thought I was just having a good time. On occasion I would clean my fish tank with such focus, I demanded perfection, not a drop of dirt (even if some remaining dirt is good), it had to be pristine.

I would prepare myself for studying by taking a knife to my skin. It soothed the thoughts, it soothed the chaos. And when I lost focus, when my friend tutoring me got too frustrating, I would cut myself again to regain focus. Cutting myself worked better than any stimulant I’ve ever taken for focus.

One night we had friends over and I was lost in this person who wasn’t me- but a “better version” of me. She would jump around and entertain everyone. She had the idea to play shirtless Twister. So all the guys did. And then she decided to test her roommate, to see if she had the guts to do it too. She did, with some encouragement. The whole idea was stupid, pointless. But this version of me was so desperate to do something wild, and nothing ever seemed to be enough. My friends were too tame, and that was best for me, even if I hated it.

Another night we were returning from a store and pulling into the campus parking lot when a police officer holding a shotgun stopped us. We were informed there was a gunman on campus and we needed to go elsewhere until he was found.

I found this hilarious.

We went to our friend’s place and I was energized. I was excited about the gunman. My friend’s roommate was rather cute and in the military (which was a big bonus to me), so I tried to flirt with him, I wanted to drink with him. But some part of me was too scared. Some part of me knew I was acting way out of line, and unattractively so. So instead I tried to calm down by laying on the couch and fiddling with my knife, particularly pleased with myself because it made my roommate nervous.

When we were finally cleared to return to campus, I plopped down on my roommate’s bed. I started laughing hysterically. And tears began to stream down my eyes. Between fits of laughter I asked them if they wanted to know something hilarious. They said sure. I laughed as I cried, and hiccuped the words, “My therapist tried to force me to go to the hospital today… Isn’t that hilarious!?!” I stopped laughing, I wiped the tears off my face, and left the room. My friends exchanged concerned glances.

My bipolar has never been the most extreme. Perhaps because I am so young still. The trip to the ER was a changing point though. My parents received the bill, I asked to go into outpatient treatment, and the treatment center decided I needed to be inpatient. Sometime in that process I was diagnosed bipolar, I don’t even remember it.

The paperwork says I was crying and laughing during my initial evaluation. That I said, “I don’t care if I die. And I have 17 knives at home.”

I later lied and said they misheard me, I only had 7- not 17.

I actually had 21.

In any case, the whole experience was a wake up call. I still can’t believe the way I acted. The way I told everyone cutting wasn’t a problem, that it was fine, and I was safe. When the reality is that less than an inch made the difference between life and death for me.

The school suspended me for cutting myself on campus. I was told I’d be arrested if I came on campus. I was evicted, with a police escort.

But that’s another story.

I think that perhaps I was in a mixed episode for most the beginning of the second year of college. I was so up but I was also so down. I would cut as punishment. I would cut to focus. I would cut if I was happy. I would cut if I simply felt like it. I did it constantly. And the therapist saw what was coming when he tried to force me into the hospital. He saw that ER trip coming.

I know I talk a lot about self harm. For me, it goes hand in hand with bipolar.

I was doing well with abstaining until my last episode, which was this last winter. I had nothing to lose, so I was cutting myself again. My legs still show sleek red lines going in every direction. The mania wanted me to.

With me, there are no neat, clean cut, straight lines. I go to town, slicing and dicing with anger. There is nothing calculated or calm or in control about it. Look at the scars, you’ll see.

The mania also wanted me to vandalize things. I felt as if no one understood what I was feeling. I would wake up fine, but I’d quickly degrade. For some reason, I was possessed by the need to make it worse. So I would take too much Ritalin and I’d drink coffee. I left the house to go to therapy when I came up with a brilliant plan. I was going to go to a popular mall and cut words into the bathroom stall, then cut myself, smear my hand with blood, and leave a bloody hand print right there on the stall wall.

I needed people to know. And not just know- but feel. I was terrified of myself, I couldn’t slow down and I couldn’t stop myself. I wanted someone to walk into that bathroom stall and feel the terror the hand print was sure to elicit.

People had to know.

So I went to a sporting good store and bought a cheap utility knife (since all mine had been entrusted to someone for safe keeping). But the traffic on the freeway caused me to miss my opportunity. I had to go to the psychiatrist and I didn’t have time to stop by the mall.

The idea lingered in my head but I never did it. My therapist said she almost involuntarily hospitalized me for my urges to vandalize.

Another idea I had was to go to the local park and carve words into the trees. It was daytime, so I went for a walk. I casually strolled around the park, stopping to examine trees, trying not to be too suspicious as other people were there. I did hide behind a tree and barely scrawled the words, “Help me” into a tree, but you’d never be able to tell. But I had plans… plans to come back later that night when it would be empty and leave large, blatant messages in prominent trees. I specifically wanted to write, “I’ve gone mad.” Or something like it. And then, in a hidden spot, where only the adventurous would see, I’d leave a secret message, “Help me.”

But when I made an excuse to leave that night, I decided to go to the bookstore before the vandalism. I wandered around the bookstore, I tried to focus on the titles of the books but my vision blurred far too much. I wandered around, paranoid that everyone knew I was not okay. The bookstore overwhelmed me. There were too many books, too many people, too much of everything. So I drove home, back to that park. But I detoured. I saw the Christmas lights. And I drove down a street that was heavily decorated. The euphoria washed over me. I drove around for however long, just admiring the lights. (I’ve never been impressed by Christmas lights, by the way). In the end I decided trees were just too beautiful to ruin with my knife.

Another day it was raining but I was desperate to go soak it in. I told my mom I was going for a walk and grabbed an umbrella. But the rain stopped and I found myself at the park alone. I didn’t know what to do, I didn’t want to carve the trees because it was my good knife (that I paid a lot of money for). So instead I found the swing set. And I popped in some earbuds. The euphoria was intense. But I also had paranoia, so I tucked my knife into my hand, positioning it so I could pop it open in a second and … well, you know.

Of course this was ridiculous, as the closest entrance I had full view of, and an attacker would have to walk across a large open field to get anywhere near me from behind (and I checked constantly).

I could go on about the mania I felt this last winter. It was the first time I knew I was manic. I’m only 21, my episodes aren’t very severe. But I still have many years ahead of me. I know now that my bipolar can take charge at any moment. I had to miss my last quarter of school because I simply went to class high on pills, then I’d cut between classes, and I couldn’t focus. I was just too manic.

I just started my first day of the new quarter. It was terrifying.

I wrote this and it is very disorganized. But that in itself is what mania is for me. It is chaos in my mind.

Mania is a 5’4, 97lb female with dirty blonde hair, brown eyes, an asymmetrical pixie cut, a small assortment of bold ear piercings, and a tattoo on her side rib cage. It is that girl being the life of the party, laughing while crying, cutting herself, plotting to vandalize to make a statement. A girl sitting on her bed, head in hands, her thoughts screaming, “SHUT UP SHUT UP” over and over again, trying to make the whirlwind stop so she could do something as simple as brushing her teeth.

So you want to see the face of a bipolar person? Well I can’t show you that. My career goals don’t allow me to make my disorder public, just yet.

But I’ll compromise. You can see how I intended to look during my vandalism urges (minus the sunglasses).

While some may brave a bare face… my true bipolar face, is not my bare face.

This is what bipolar looks like on me.

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Just Another Manic Blip

I take a prescribed Ritalin to prepare myself to study, to give me the energy to get through the remainder of the day. This last night before the final is the most important. I’ve had a whole quarter off, a whole 10 weeks plus winter break, because of my manic episode. It has given me time to finish a class that I took an incomplete in because I broke my wrist (but, in reality, it wasn’t so much the broken wrist, as much as it was my cracking mind that forced me to take the incomplete).

My dad comes home with food and the coffee I asked him to buy me. I start sipping at it and realize what’s happening. The ritalin is kicking in, the coffee is too. I’ve got too much energy racing through me. My thoughts are going off left and right like a firework finale. I’m agitated. I’m texting long rants to at least 4 people, I’m writing blog posts. I feel amped up, wired.

Sometimes these little mini-episodes happen to me. I think the Ritalin and coffee set me off. My therapist says that, since I’m so young, I may sometimes have episodes more like a child’s- rapid and short. And I do have these, quite often. I’ve also been told that these may happen when you’re stabilizing on medication. All I know is that they’ve always happened to me.

My day has been long. I had to wake up, go to psychotherapy, then immediately go to physical therapy, then immediately take my cat to the vet and then immediately start studying. But plans never go accordingly. I managed all the doctor’s visits fine, but it was the studying that threw me off. I tell myself I can relax a few minutes, but here I am- 5 hours later, and I haven’t studied. What went wrong?

Well, after the Ritalin and coffee kick-started me, I felt I had to run an errand. You see, I had an infection recently (of a nature I won’t describe) and I’m afraid it has come back. I already called the doctor to make an appointment, but I am impatient to know. I get the idea that maybe the drug store sells tests for them. I text my boyfriend, who manages a drug store, and he says they do sell those.

I figure maybe getting out of the house, getting the test, that’ll ease my mind. So I go, and I walk around the store, buzzing with energy. I look everywhere, my mind racing so fast it is hard to focus on the words on the labels. I feel lost but determined to find them on my own- which I do.

I get home and I read the directions, my eyes are glazing over as I read it. The words aren’t processing. I try to slow down. It takes a while, but I think I get how to do it. Which is ridiculous, I realize, because I used to conduct these same tests at my old job.

I come out positive, figures.

That’s over. But I’m still alive with energy. I realize it’s been long enough, the Ritalin has peaked in my system and I should be settling down, the coffee can’t possibly be keeping me this abuzz. It dawns on me that it’s the stress. The fact that I am unprepared for a test I had ample time to study for. I should ace this test (given all the time I had), but I know that I’ll barely pass it, if that. I was too manic over my break to study. I was barely able to do what I did. And now it is my last day- and I am so panicky that it set my brain off. The stress caused me to crack, to have a mini-episode.

I know I need to shower, that should calm me, right? Don’t they always say showers will calm your nerves? I hop in and the water pours over me. I put my hands to my face and run them back over my hair. It’s always this way when I’m manic- it feels like I’ve never showered before, the water is foreign. It is so bizarre. At first, it’s overwhelming, overstimulating. But then I get lost in my thoughts, consumed by obsessive thinking.

A thought pops out at me like a big red stop sign that’s been unusually placed in the middle of the road. I realize I am self-narrating. It’s a phenomenon I’ve never heard anyone else have or even describe, but I’ve never bothered to look it up to see.

Self-narrating is as follows: My thoughts have made a transition in their style. Instead of just thinking, I am writing a first-person story in my head. I am tracing my every movement, my every thought, as if I am writing it in a book. To put it simply, what you are reading right now is exactly what my thoughts are like.

It took me years to realize this is something I only do when I am very sick. I did it all throughout high school and never thought much of it, but I was also in an incredibly deep depressive episode. It wasn’t until my last manic episode, when I started self-narrating again, that I realized I had stopped for a while. It is now something I use to judge how sick I am. If I self-narrate, I am very sick or stressed out (although the two seem to go hand in hand).

I continue my shower, all while being obnoxiously conscious of my self-narrating. I wish I could write out what my self-narrating sounds like, but I can’t. It is literally what you are reading right now.

I may be a writer, but sometimes it is not by choice.

I step out of the shower and snag my towel. I put it to my face as usual, but I hold it there for a minute and let my tears soak into it. The moment passes and I continue on. I feel strangely calmer. Maybe it was the shower but I figure it was probably the Ativan I took before.

I’m annoyed with myself, I realize I am going to have to write this out before I can start on my studying. Sometimes the thoughts in my head get so built up that there is a pressure, an ache to get it on paper. It is not a want, it is a need. This is also something that only happens when I am very sick. In high school, during my depression, I would write obsessively. I was un-medicated then and if you ever look back at my writing, it is painfully obvious that I was a very sick teenager. After I was medicated, the writing stopped becoming a need, and soon faded into a past habit.

But I was inspired to start a blog and ever since then the need to write has engulfed me. When I had my manic episode, I not only wrote many long blog posts, but I also started writing a “book.” By the end of my episode I had over 60 pages of a single-spaced word document written. I believe that translates into easily over 100 pages of a standard size book? I’m not too sure though.

I am still not completely stable after that episode. I get these little spurts of mania, other times I get depressive lows. They happen almost every day, I am always a little up or a little down. But today I had an especially strong high.

And it is only now that I have written this out that I feel calmer. There is still an agitation residing in my heart. If I didn’t have to study I would be out, shopping or maybe hanging out with a friend. Just doing something.

Sometimes mania is described as feeling extra happy. But unless I am euphoric (which is brief but welcome), I am never happy during mania. Instead, I am incredibly agitated. It is not fun, it is frightening. I want it to stop, but at the same time I never want it to end- and I have no idea why. But that word- happiness- it does not define my mania. It does not belong in its definition. Euphoria may, but happiness does not.

Mania is incredibly uncomfortable.

But now… now that the thoughts are on paper, I can rest a little easier. I can study, I hope. All that remains is proof-reading this, closing the laptop, and sitting down with paper, pen, and notes.

I can do this. I can do this. I can pass this class. I won’t let my bipolar stop me. I will not fail, I won’t risk my dreams of becoming either a psychiatrist or psychologist be stopped by the fact that I had a manic blip in my day.

I can’t fail.

And it is that fact- I can’t fail- that drives me to feel such madness.

-Quinn

A Fragile Mind

I want to take Xanax the way I used to. The irresponsible and reckless way. The dangerous way. The way I don’t advise anyone to ever take it.

I want to drown out how awful I feel. I may have taken a quarter off, not to heal my broken wrist but to mend my manic mind, but I am still fragile.

I took an incomplete in a class, but I have to finish it sometime. And that deadline is right around the corner. I am not prepared and I do not have the strength to care.

Part of me is giving up, ready to fail a college course for the first time. Ready to ruin my future as a psychiatrist or psychologist. But part of me is still squirming to hold onto my dreams, to finish this class, to stay in the game.

Just listen to the online lectures, take notes, and memorize everything. Yet I can’t even tell you the names of the diseases I’ve learned, let alone their symptoms or treatments.

This should be an easy class, even an enjoyable one, but some professors know how to make even the most interesting of subjects into a nightmare.

Maybe the mania is gone, a vague memory where I was someone possessed by the need to vandalize, pop pills, and stare at Christmas lights. But I’m not stable. I’m always a little up or a little down.

I don’t think it is possible for me to be perfectly stable. It’d be like trying to balance a coin on its thin side in a windstorm.

My bipolar is and never will be the productive type. Some people go manic, and get everything done. Me? I destroy everything I can, myself included, and I want the world to see that. And the depression? It just doesn’t care enough.

I go to two types of therapy right now. One for my wrist and one for my mind. It has taken months to repair my wrist, but the evidence is visible, I’m always going forward, I’m always improving.

But the mind isn’t like a broken wrist. I’ve been going to therapy for years and yet I can go backwards. Some days I even fall and break all over again, as if I never healed to begin with.

When I was hospitalized at 19, another bipolar patient took me by the shoulders, looked at me very carefully and warned me- “You’re already so young to be in here. It’s only going to get worse. Be careful.”

And maybe you’d think he is wrong for saying it’ll only get worse. But he wasn’t. It has gotten worse, just in a different way. Yes, my youth is an advantage. Getting help early on may have saved my life more times than I know. But he was right- It’s gotten worse and I do need to be careful.

But what is being careful when it comes to your mind?

-Quinn