Fighting Mania

I’ve been seated (by zombies) firmly in front of the computer.  Sir was not as amused by my crazy inflatable arm man impression as he might have been.  Possibly because I smacked my hand really hard on the wall and… kept doing it.

It’s spring.  Yes, despite the three fucking feet of snow outside right now, it’s spring.  Spring means that the amount of sunlight each day is increasing.  Increasing sunlight is my brain’s signal to GO MANIC!  WOOOHOO!!  Seriously, my doctor told me this every year…
“The highest number of hospitalizations for bipolar are always in the spring.”

The last few days I’ve been in more mixed states, which means my brain is both depressed and manic at the same time, which is basically like the bio-chemical equivalent of a tornado…  It results in… panic attacks, anxiety, aggression, short-temperedness (shut up, it’s totally a word!).  With medication I could always just increase or decrease certain of my meds (I was always on a cocktail) to compensate for this and I (mostly) could go on like a normal person.  I had a few angry moments at work that I wasn’t totally in control of…  But mostly… I could hide it.

Now I don’t have medication anymore.  I have other strategies that don’t, you know, destroy my kidneys and liver… so that’s a plus.  But they aren’t as promptly effective as drugs… so… that’s a downer.  Only, not really, it’s an upper… because I’m MANIC!

It’s not mixed states anymore, now it’s full on euphoria, which is so much more fun. Much less like the worst case of PMS ever and more like… um… crazy inflatable arm man!!!

I try to hide my states from people, even close friends… I am… embarrassed by them.  I’m embarrassed to not have control over myself.  It’s like being drunk, but not having the choice about drinking in the first place.  It’s like just making a fool of myself and being out of control and I didn’t even get to make the choice to drink.  And that’s… difficult.

But, I told Sir a while back that one of the things I saw as a purpose of having my blog (among other things) is a place to be honest about my brain disorder.  Completely honest.  When madness descends, and when it lifts.  And sometimes that’s hard because I go back and read times when I was fully losing control and it’s difficult to read my own words from those times.  Sometimes I don’t clearly remember states later, so reading my thinking during them is… interesting… disturbing… enlightening… Sir hopes that I will develop empathy for myself by seeing how challenging the literal function of my brain is, and how I manage to keep going despite it.

That kind of makes me cry.  I’m really bad with self-empathy and compassion, even though I’m trying to stick with it.  It still triggers tears really quickly and I’m not completely sure why.

Um, so… I’ve written through mixed states.  I’ve written through depressed states.  I’ve even written through a borderline psychotic state.  Here’s a manic state.

I let Sir see my manic states.  And… I think that’s important to me.  It’s like… I can control some of the energy around other people, but by the evening (when I always try to be home and away from others) when my brain is tired, I have the least control.  Letting Sir see that side of me is… a kind of intimacy that I can allow because… we have other kinds of intimacy.  But I still flinch a little, even when he sees it.  Even when he sees it and he doesn’t judge me or make me feel bad about it.

That’s hard.

Because EVERYTHING makes me feel judged and feel bad about it.

All my life, well-intentioned people have said things like, “Take a breath…  Slow down… Wow, you’re really talkative… You’re running at the mouth…  You’re like Mickey Mouse on speed…”  And some less kind things.

Some of them had no idea I’m bipolar.  Some of them did.

Even my therapist sometimes says something because she literally can’t do a session because I’m bouncing from topic to topic so fast.  And even as she says it so kindly and so gently… it still hurts… deeply.  Because I feel like I’m broken and I’ve failed when I let it slip the leash so badly that someone has to call me on it.

I went running down the hallway tonight being crazy inflatable arm man (and shouting that fact as I ran).  Sir who was at the other end of the hall just smiled at me, and when I got to him, he caught me around the waist and kissed me.

Of course, then I hit my hand and made myself bleed, and then he made me stop waving around and said, “Go write about it…”

And he… just didn’t want me hurting myself and he wanted to funnel me somewhere harmless, where I can spill out my energy without hurting myself… other than letting people see my broken places…

But I think some part of me was still hurt.  Or maybe I just… have been hurt so often I look for it to hurt… because I said something a little mean to him.  I don’t even know if I was trying to be mean of if it just came out from carelessness and mania… and that’s… I don’t know if that’s worse.  It seems like it might be…  But I said something mean.  I said, “You always have had a thing for us crazies…”

T had bipolar.  He had it worse than me.  He died of suicide.  This is a disease, and it is often fatal.  People don’t think of suicide as the terminal point of a disease, but it is.  Cancer may cause organ failure, heart failure may cause cardiac arrest…  Bipolar causes suicide.  T had bipolar and he died from it.  And… I… brought that back with my words tonight.  And I’m not sure why.

I think, honestly, it was self-loathing.  It was self-deprecation, it was minimizing myself, but… I can’t do that without minimizing T, who I would never do… I always think he did nothing wrong, he was a fighter, he fought his whole life, and it’s not his fault that he lost…  He didn’t give up…  It just… didn’t happen for him.  Just like MJ couldn’t, ultimately, survive his disease.

But somehow, me… I’m… just a crazy.  And I managed to hurt Sir, and disparage T’s name in my fit of hating myself.  And that causes a very painful dissonance.

I really miss MJ…

And T…

Bipolar sucks.

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