About my last post…
The one where I talked about how suicidal I was today.
Well I went to take my meds… And saw I hadnt taken them last night.
I cried. Sometimes we bipolars get it in our heads to quit, which I even considered recently, but last night I simply forgot…
And then I wanted to kill myself today.
Please take your meds everyone. Please dont forget.
-Quinn
*Trigger warning- Suicide*
I woke up to my cell phone buzzing, upon answering it I find my test results for a certain physical problem were not determinable with the tests done at that lab, as a result, I will have to see a specialist.
This could either mean 1) my symptoms are psychosomatic (common problem with me) or 2) I have a serious problem.
In any case, I went along my day. I went to my second day back at college and it started horribly. At first I had the patience to be involved in the 3 hour long lab. But it dragged on, describing all the intricate details of animal reproductive anatomy. I’m not quite sure what there is even left to learn for the rest of the quarter.
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According to HealthyPlace.com, here are the symptoms of Autism.
Impairment in social and emotional reciprocity that ranges from abnormal social approaches and failure to participate in typical give-and-take conversations to diminished sharing of interests and emotions as well as failure to respond to social cues and interactions.
What does that even mean???? I guess it means that we have general problems and difficulties with social interaction. But a little more deeply, I guess it means that in conversations we tend to either do all the talking or let the other person do all the talking. We may approach people in a way that is a bit abnormal, which may entail diving straight into our chosen topic without pausing for small talk. Don’t look at me funny; These are just guesses. We may share too much or too little of our interest and/or emotions. We may also fail to see when the other person is getting bored, or when the other person may be trying to make friends with us or take advantage of us.
Impairment in use and understanding of nonverbal communications used in social interactions, such as inability to make eye contact and abnormalities in body language. These children also have difficulty understanding the use of physical gestures and often have a complete lack of facial expression.
This basically means we have difficulties understanding and using body language.
Impairment in developing and maintaining social relationships
Well, this one is obvious.
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Of course my illness is not me. I often struggle to find myself. There are so many selves I have hoped to be, hoped to find. I feel that, one by one, I have had them drain away from me. Perhaps they were stolen, perhaps they were never there. Recently I had gotten to the point of not caring, of withdrawing into nihilism. I had resigned and checked out of life.
But then my wife kept reminding me of the one thing that I absolutely must hang on to: my daughter. “If you do it for no one else, do it for her.” My daughter is achingly attached to me. And I am equally attached to her.
As I descend into depression or withdraw into my racing mind, I become distant from her. I lose my time with her and she loses her time with me. More frightening, I have been experiencing explosive anger lately. I have yelled at her more than once and snapped at my wife. This was a wake up call to me like no other.
I got on Klonopin and told my wife she was not to leave my daughter alone with me in the house. Not because I feared hitting her, but because I feared yelling at her. Twelve step programs often speak of the need to “hit bottom” before rising up again. I always believed that term so indeterminate as to mean almost nothing. And I have had days when I have felt far worse than I have felt recently. I’m not sure what kept me from checking into a hospital those times. But when you have to tell your wife she can’t leave your daughter alone with you…
My illness is not me, but perhaps recent events, losing my job, getting a proper diagnosis, and realizing the importance of my health to my most precious daughter, may lead me to myself.
I am taking steps. I am considering changing a career. I’m picking up an instrument. The last twenty years of my life cannot be regained, but perhaps the next forty can be a time of blossoming.
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.
The roller coaster analogy never really spoke to me. I didn’t experience a thrilling ride. It was more like a tornado or a hurricane, a central column of madly swirling air that threw everything in its path asunder only to die and leave a still, bleak landscape of broken trees and shattered homes where no one could live. “Things fall apart,” goes the Yeats poem. “The center cannot hold.” Mania causes us to lose sight of our center and depression causes us to forget that we ever had one.
I count myself fortunate that I never ended up in jail though perhaps some might have made a case for it. Drugs and alcohol, at least, never presented themselves as ways to temper my emotions — I distrusted them. I let whatever flew out of the maelstrom hit me square on and I did nothing to numb the pain except hide in my room or rage unexpectedly.
Bipolar is one of those illnesses that everyone who has watched a Lifetime Channel movie thinks that he or she knows, but they have no clue. The illness doesn’t make us evil. Most of the things that I did in my rages and panics were moved by an innocent heart. I have found the same to be true of others. But often what we do is hurtful. It is no wonder that outsiders see us as brutes. When I have acted with the most vigor and erraticness, I have done so the name of one or another great crusade, marching against problems that often only I could see. Heraclitus once said that “The waking have one and the same world, the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” Bipolar creates in that waking world a sub-world that we who labor with the illness experience on our own. In it we sleep a sleep of wakefulness. Perhaps this is due to the restlessness of mania that keeps us up night after night, day after day.
Eventually things fall apart and we find our minds in bizarre places.
My worst psychotic episode happened when I was working over Christmas break in college. The world became a maze of passageways like I see in my dreams, the doors to the rooms hazy and difficult to find. I believed that I was God and that I had messed up the world. Once that a coworker asked me what was wrong. I did my best to deny that the veils between us did not exist. It was a tricky maneuver but I pulled it off. Every night I returned to my room and found darkness. When the other students returned, I felt less lonely, but I felt I wasn’t one of them. I hid in my room, held my tongue and kept my condition to myself. They knew nothing of my obsession or the distortions that blurred my cognition. Sometimes they would find me staring into space and wonder if I was on drugs. I was stone cold sober. An ill gift of prophecy settled over me. I believed that I could predict what people were going to say. I became sensitive to the occasions when people would utter words that I had encountered in my reading with no connection to the class or the context. My skin jumped at their mention and my shivers from remembering the incidents of my day kept me up. The episode slowly lifted over the semester, though I did have to drop a class.
Sixteen years passed before I sought the aid of a psychiatrist. Eleven more needed to turn over before I started telling the truth about my experiences. Oh the rages, the insomnias, the dark nights of the soul, and the mind-crushing paranoias that troubled me even though I took antidepressants and thought myself cured! The word “bipolar” was, at last, used. During the eleven years of denial, I refused to believe that it applied to me though I numbered it in others. One day in the hospital, it caught up with me, though. The new attachment to my identity electrified me. I read all I could, kept finding myself between the pages, and in the end surrendered to my diagnosis. Then I took my pills as prescribed, dieted, exercised, and broke down the walls that kept the world outside of my dream.
Though my doctors named my condition, my condition was not me. I had always had doubts about this wreck of a brain that always seemed to say and do things against my better judgment. Outsiders sometimes tell me that mood stabilizers erase the personality. They have no clue. When I got on lithium and it started working, I found myself able to be the me that I knew I always was, free of the control of the randomness-loving demon who operated my body like a slot machine whose prizes were shame and sorrow. Over the years, I have added and subtracted more medications to my cocktail until I had a firm foundation upon which I could finally build a brick house. When the madman tried to seize control of my inner weather, I had a series of steps that I could take to seal myself inside my house and wait out the storm. This security enabled me at last to separate myself from my illness. I knew, at last, who I was. Life was no longer a bad dream.
I don’t know if reading through my posts I sound like I have a lot of present mood disorder issues. I wish I didn’t have it or have to deal with it, but I am much, much, much better than when I was first diagnosed.
At that time, I was psychotic, but even before then, I had times when I would cry for no reason or not leave the house. I haven’t been hospitalized since 2005 or had psychotic symptoms since 2006. I have coping skills. I don’t micro-manage symptoms. If i have a good day I enjoy and take advantage without worrying if it is going to turn into mania.
My biggest issue now is anxiety and even that is better. It is hard for me to notice, but people around me tell me I seem more at ease. I do presentations for NAMI which is hard for me to believe with my social anxiety. I am not a great speaker, but they go over well.
I am married. I was diagnosed after 7 years of marriage, so my husband didn’t sign up to marry someone with a mental illness but he has been supportive. I have 2 teenagers, who are doing well, for teenagers. I do some volunteer work, I would say an issue i have now is time management.
Alright, guys. I’m going to show you my face right now, since today is Bipolar Awareness Day or whatever.
I have brown hair, with a pink and blonde streak in it. It is straight, and grows almost to my shoulder but not quite. The bangs mostly cover my forehead, which is free of acne. I have unplucked eyebrows, but they still look decent. My eyes are brown, and my eyelashes are average. I have a piercing on my right cheek, and a “cute button nose” as my old gender therapist once described it. My face is a little red, with some spots. However, it’s not half as bad as it used to be. I don’t know how to describe my lips, except that they are relatively full and they turn a little downward. I definitely have a chin. I consider my face to be round/oval-ish. It’s not a fat face at all, but it’s definitely fatter than it would be if I was not somewhat overweight. However, from a distance, it’s relatively pretty.
When I was younger, I often got the sensation of having large and pointy ears on the top of my head. I could never decide whether they were cat or wolf ears. This wasn’t just an imaginary thing; I really felt them. When people spoke to me, I would always angle my imaginary ears towards them. When I looked away, I would still do this. I assumed people would see them, and know I was listening. However, nobody could see them so it was useless. Since I also had the ability to retract them at will, I made the choice to retract them permanently one day. I haven’t been able to feel my “cat ears” since, even when i’ve tried to.
Now that we’ve got that part out of the way, we can get on to real business.
My face is a topic that i’m sort of sick of talking about, because i’ve discussed it a lot in gender therapy. I’ve also written about my face, how it bothers me, and how it doesn’t bother me. I have face issues sometimes, and they are connected to whatever gender issues I have. I have times where it bothers me more, and times when it almost doesn’t bother me at all. I’m sort of genderfluid that way.
It’s not that I want a beard. It’s that once, I accidentally got a haircut that made my face look sort of masculine. When I looked into the mirror that day, I felt like I was looking at my real self for the first time. I have never been able to get the same effect since, no matter what i’ve tried or what i’ve done. So no one will ever see my real face, and no one will ever understand who I truly am.
*TRIGGER WARNING*
I must tell the truth here: I do not understand what Andreas Lubitz did. In my suicidal fugues, I thought of many ways that I might kill myself that involved others such as throwing myself in front of a truck or crashing my car into a tree or driving it off a cliff, but the idea of taking others with me — that wasn’t the self-annihilation that I planned. When I came close,I found a secluded place where someone would eventually find me. That was the maximum involvement of another that I planned. Though I thought capital punishment might work for me — and send a message to those who loved me — I did not want to assassinate others.
>Rumor has it that Lubitz was going through some catastrophic issues with his girlfriend. He knew that he was ill and he was seeking treatment for it. The day of the crash, his psychiatrist issued a sick leave note. Andreas did not use it, however, and his doctor could not call the airline to tell them that he was at risk. But Lubitz did not stop at ending his own life:
Andreas Lubitz was breathing, steady and calm, in the final moments of Germanwings Flight 9525. It was the only sound from within the cockpit that the voice recorder detected as Mr. Lubitz, the co-pilot, sent the plane into its descent.
The sounds coming from outside the cockpit door on Tuesday were something else altogether: knocking and pleading from the commanding pilot that he be let in, then violent pounding on the door and finally passengers’ screams moments before the plane, carrying 150 people, slammed into a mountainside in the French Alps.
In a different article, The New York Times reported that Lubitz concealed his illness from those closest to him:
Peter Rücker, a member of the flight club where Mr. Lubitz learned to fly, told Reuters television on Thursday that he knew the young man as a cheerful, careful pilot, and that he could not imagine him committing such an act.
Online, Mr. Lubitz appeared to be a keen runner, including at Lufthansa’s Frankfurt sports club, and had completed several half-marathons and other medium-distance races, including an annual New Year’s run in Montabaur in 2014.
A Facebook page with a few tidbits of his possible “likes” was visible Wednesday but had been removed by late morning on Thursday. It showed a photograph of a young man near the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, though there were no clues to when the image was taken or any other details….
Data from the plane’s transponder also suggested that the person at the controls had manually reset the autopilot to take the plane from 38,000 feet to 96 feet, the lowest possible setting, according to Flightradar24, a flight tracking service. The aircraft struck a mountainside at 6,000 feet.
Before Mr. Lubitz, 27, a German citizen, set the plane on its 10-minute descent about half an hour into the flight from Barcelona, Spain, to Düsseldorf, Germany, the cockpit voice recorder picked up only the usual pilot banter, “courteous” and “cheerful” exchanges, the prosecutor said.
Then the commanding pilot asked Mr. Lubitz to take over. A seat can be heard being pulled back and a door closing as the captain exits the cockpit.
Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, takes the position that nothing could be done, that even the best system in the world cannot protect the public 100% from such disasters. And they are confident that they have a good one.
I am not a big fan of willy nilly violations of confidentiality. It seems to me, however, that there should have been a way for the doctor to tell the airline that Lubitz was a danger to self and others and see that he was grounded. There should be ways for the pilot to open the door from the outside of the cockpit or to place a toilet inside the cockpit so he doesn’t have to enter the passenger section of the plane. So many things can have been done differently, but I am afraid that this is not where the media, public opinion, and politics will take us. The Times’ restraint will almost certainly be accompanied by more shrill attacks on the mentally ill among us. Lubitz, I dread will become another hockey mask, another poster child who will be held up as a clarion call for denying the mentally ill their confidentiality. Laws stand before Congress that call for allowing “caregivers” to be informed of what goes on between psychiatrists and the most severe mentally ill. Will Andreas Lubitz’s crash take us another step? Who else will psychiatrists be forced to inform? How will confidentiality be broken after this incident? Who else will be able to enter the circle that HIPAA laws now defend? I shudder at the possibilities.
We must look, I think, at another major factor in this crash: stigma. Some out there think that stigma like racism no longer exists or impacts on lives. Believe me, it is alive and well. I know people who have lost jobs because their employers found out about their illness. We are told that we are ax murderers even though we have no history of violence or making threats. Friends decide that they want nothing more to do with us. Spouses panic and file papers for divorce. Now they will say that we harbor these impulses in secret, that we are all ticking time bombs.
Andreas Lubitz kept his illness a secret, I suspect, because of what would have happened to him. He would have lost a lucrative job. He might have found himself unemployed for months or even years. Friends would shun him. He would find himself very alone. In the final analysis, because he could not reveal his ache — because he could not talk about it without bringing an end to the life he had worked so hard to create for himself — the pressure built on him. When he found himself alone at the controls of the jet, he forgot the passengers. Only his pain was real to him and he ended it in the most powerful way he could.
People see the scars on my arms and legs and they tell me to stop in various ways.
But what people don’t see is all the other ways I harm myself. I get myself into bad self-destructive situations. I smoke, I drink, I take a little too much Xanax, I get into pointless arguments.
Self-harming isn’t just cutting yourself or even burning, hitting, etc.
The actions you take can be self harm too.
It may not be the definition. Maybe it doesn’t count. But to me, these are ways I hurt myself.
I’m putting myself in a situation that will lead to bad consequences. But I can’t help myself. I don’t know how to stop.
I don’t want to talk about the situation… I told myself I’d turned over a new leaf. Yet here I am following this path of self destruction once again. And I don’t know how to make it stop.
People like me get one hell of a bad reputation. But… maybe if they were in my situation, they’d realize how hard it is. Maybe they wouldn’t think so badly of me. Well, I think badly of myself. But it feels out of control, I feel myself going through the actions, getting myself into this situation, and feeling helpless.
I just gotta hold on till I see my therapist. I need real advice, I have a real problem here.
I don’t want to be this person anymore.