Midsummer Night’s Mania

It’s July, I made it past the solstice, which is good, the ramping up/more sunlight every day thing is murder for my brain.  But summer is still hard.  There isn’t enough structure, even when I and the people around me work to create structure, it’s summer.  I NEED some unstructured time or I will burn out and not be able to teach in August.  But I also… don’t function well with unstructured time.  And even the kind of structure I can create when I’m not working, (making plans, meals out, museum/zoo trips, social gatherings, daily chores, etc.) isn’t as strong as having a work schedule.  So…  I struggle.

I’ve been flirting with mania, it’s been coming up then settling, then coming up more, then settling.  We’ve been doing all the “right things” to keep it under control.  But, sometimes, you know, there’s only so much one can do.  I had a full blown “episode” the other night.

It’s strange to me sometimes that I have “episodes” because for a lot of my life I now have my symptoms well enough managed that I don’t think of myself as having episodes anymore… that, in fact, I sometimes have a realization that I do still have bipolar (as in I’ve forgotten) and have to force myself to let go of certain demands on myself or comfort myself for certain things I’m not able to accomplish as I’d like…  And sometimes, I still have “episodes.”

I’ve always had an unusual constellation of symptoms.  I have bipolar II, which means that my manic episodes are, unless there is something extreme that pushes them into another arena (like when I was hospitalized when I was 16), hypomanic.  That means that I get all of the fun of mania without the deadly trying to fly type of delusions.  Which is, mostly, a good thing.  I had friends in the hospital with bipolar I who, during episodes, had tried to swim across the Pacific…  fly across the Grand Canyon (with their arms)…  etc.  Friends with them had thought it was funny and dragged them back out of the ocean or away from the edge, but… it isn’t really funny… it’s… a disease.  And it’s so hard for people to deal with.  And I rapid-cycle, so while other people might have an episode that lasts 4 days (or much longer), mine can shift from one extreme to the other in hours or minutes.  Which makes it even harder for people to deal with.  It is like Colorado’s freaking weather!  And it takes a while to learn how to deal with it.

I realized this the other night when I was in the middle of the episode because, I’m self-aware, for the most part, unless things go super badly, I maintain a degree of awareness of my own state.  So I know I’m manic when I’m manic.  I recognize my own symptoms, I’m educated about them, and I can talk about them with detachment, even in the midst of them.  But, I’m incredibly sensitive about them.  All my life… I felt judged by my lack of control.  As if this disease is something I choose and my behavior is willing.

I find that Sir is often a source of bringing these contradictions up and thus I end up writing about my thinking about them because of him…  (Thanks a lot, Sir!)  And this was another of those times.

I was manic.  It began with goal-oriented behavior.  Now, most people are functionally goal-oriented, that isn’t inherently a problem, but for me, in the early stages of a manic episode, I become more goal-oriented than my usual personality.  In some ways this is nice because I get shit done!  I take on projects and shit gets DONE.  This time I wrote a 9 page new chapters to a story I’d not worked on in almost a year…  I shopped for, cooked, and stored several meals, I went through my closets and drawers and pulled out a very large box worth of clothing to donate…  I made business phone calls.  I got shit done.  And this was all within the space of about 24 hours.

Now if I could just maintain productivity and not lose anything else, then great… but it doesn’t work that way.  The energy keeps building, kind of like an engine.  It’s great to increase the gas to a certain degree, but too much gas becomes unusable and the engine floods, right?  Same with my energy.  I build up to a point at which the productivity tatters, there is too much energy and it overwhelms focus and just starts spilling out uncontrolled.  That’s when I start getting the physical jumping, hopping, skipping, running, doing jumping jacks for no apparent reason…  I just feel like my body is overrun with physical energy and I have to express it, get it out of myself.

The energy also becomes… dancing… singing… being silly… almost like I’m drunk or buzzed or high on something.  The other night I was re-enacting the Genie in Aladdin.  And that can just be having fun and being sillly, but… sometimes, like that night… there’s this internal pressure building, driving it, and it’s not just silliness and fun anymore…  It’s more than that.

Alongside the motor agitation and talkativity, I get what they call “pressured speech.”  This goes on a continuum along with my energy level, but initially is just a heightened talkativity, which becomes more and more rapid and frantic speech, as if I am being pressured to continue talking, and when it gets really bad, it can become so frantic that I start stuttering and stumbling on my words and even becoming disjointed because I can’t keep my words and my thinking lined up.  DJ describes it as he imagines me in the middle of a giant web with thousands of spokes and all of the spokes branching out thousands of times and I’m sitting in the center of it trying to touch every one of the pathways and following them along their branches then realizing that I’ve forgotten then other 999 spokes and their branches and that I have to articulate all of them at the same time so I keep jumping around until… well… I burn out.  I think it’s a helpful metaphor, because, it really fits I think, what is in my head, I’ll start saying something and my brain is thinking about something else, so I’ll jump to that, and then something else…  And it helps me to know that he sees that in his head because… I guess… it helps me feel like he isn’t just annoyed at me for talking too much like other people get.  It’s like… he has empathy for me, he sees it as… I’m talking that way because something terribly overwhelming is happening in my head and I am struggling and then he sees his job to help me get out of that web… not to shut me up.  Where a lot of people just try to get me to stop talking… which does nothing to get me out of the spider web and just makes me feel ashamed of myself for being there in the first place, and for letting anyone see that I’m there…  DJ doesn’t make me feel ashamed.

Kind of along with the spider web, or because of it, or causing it… I have what is called “flight of ideas” which is kind of what it sounds like.  Except not all pretty like a bunch of butterflies… more like a bunch of moths and my head is a light bulb…  Its like being bombarded endlessly by thoughts and strings of thought and ideas and… the pressured speech makes me feel I have to talk about each of them, and they are battering me and fluttering and half the time out of my grasp and even if I catch one, it slips away again when I reach to grab another one that is battering me in the face.

When I was hospitalized in high school, this symptom had gotten so bad that I would start a sentence and then would lose what I was saying halfway through, I couldn’t remember what I’d started to say, and couldn’t remember what I was planning to say and was literally starting to say detached words and couldn’t follow my own thoughts anymore.  It was terrifying.  I couldn’t have told someone I was hungry, by the time I said, “I am” I would have no idea what I’d already said, or what I’d wanted to say, and wouldn’t have been able to communicate to anyone that I was hungry, my brain would be on to “watermelons grow” and then to “studio…”  I sounded like I was insane (and terrified my parents) and though it hasn’t been that severe again, it can get close and I have to work extremely hard to finish thoughts in a coherent way and sometimes lose them completely.  And I often can’t grasp a word to match to a concept quickly enough so I say a lot of “With the thing, that does the thing, that does the thing…”  Which, again, some people think is a joke, or just… me being silly, or you know, we all have those moments where we forget a word and “thing” it…  except for me, sometimes it’s… not just like everybody’s moments.

So then here’s DJ the other night… I was very very deep at this point, even though he had recognized I was losing control way back at the jumping and singing Aladdin songs stage and had begun helping then…

I was standing in the middle of the living room literally twitching all over because I had too much energy and I was saying to him, “I need the the the ththththththhe the the thing… the thing… I need the thing!  For the… for the thing I need! I need the thing!”

What other people have done which was ineffective would be, “What thing?  What do you need?  Is it your phone?  Is it a bowl?  Do you need water?”  And they think they’re being helpful and I’m really grateful when those people try to help me communicate because… they’re being kind and taking my seriously.  But I just get more agitated because I CAN’T TELL YOU WHAT THE THING IS!

Some people just laugh because they think I’m being silly.  That isn’t helpful.

Some people say, “Slow down, I can’t understand you, slow down…”  Not helpful AND shaming because it makes me feel like I’m choosing this and I could, if I chose, slow down and be more clear.

What DJ said: “Okay, babe, I’ll get it.  Drink this water first, okay?  I’ll get the thing, but you drink this.”  He was giving me ice water.  It’s one of the multiple “first aid” tools we have to help my brain get back under control during a manic episode.  But… see… he didn’t try to get me to be more clear… he didn’t even try to understand what I wanted, which might seem dismissive, but… in reality… there wasn’t going to be any successful way for him to get the information regardless, so he just agreed with me, validated what I was trying to say, made me feel I was communicating (even if I wasn’t) so I didn’t feel the additional pressure to keep saying it to him so he would “get it” and he did something concrete (ice water) to help bring me down.

He had no idea what the thing was.  I don’t even remember what the thing was… I think it was a whisk, but I don’t remember why I needed it so urgently…  But the thing wasn’t even the point and he managed to… help me, without invalidating me or shaming me and… I never realized how difficult that is for people.  I think, if I hadn’t been exposed to HAVING this bloody disease, I would very likely be that first category of people trying very hard to figure out what “the thing” was so I could provide it.

My third primary symptom during a manic episode (when I’m not irritable, sometimes this goes a whole other direction in which I get extremely agitated and irritable, but this was a mostly cheerful manic state), is distractability.  And this is like…  like Dory, in Finding Nemo.  And Dory is all cute and everybody loves her and she has her own movie now and it’s this whole thing.  Except when it’s me having a manic episode and then it’s not cute.  Probably cause I’m not a blue fish, or… Ellen…  But most people just get annoyed, again, and want me to “focus.”  I hate when people tell me to “focus.”  It’s shaming, again, and hurtful.  I’m a full grown adult, if I could be focused, I would damn well be focused, especially if you’re in front of me, because, if I’m not focused it means I’m out of control of myself and there is nothing more mortifying for me than losing control IN FRONT OF SOMEONE.  So please don’t tell me to “focus.”

So, Sir, after shutting down all electronics, shutting off lights, closing blackout curtains, (eliminating external stimuli is stage one first aid for mania), getting ice water down me (cold and pain can cause nerve gating that will stop the chemical cascade that propels mania), started steering me towards the shower.

Now, at the time, we were in the front of the house… the shower is at the back of the house… unless he wanted to get me into the bathtub shower, but I’ve had a tendency to trip/fall/step on the sloped edges, etc. when in the tub during a manic episode, so he steers for the back bedroom which has a shower stall.  It’s not that long a hallway… but it’s amazing the number of things I can find in that fifteen foot walk to attach my attention to…  The light fixtures, the closet door, the OMG, I need to sort my coats, some of them should go to Goodwill… the first bathroom, Oh, I forgot to move the laundry, I need to move the laundry to the drier… and toothbrush, and is there enough soap in that bathroom?  And there’s a picture on the wall, I should hang up other pictures, I used to have my family pictures hung up, but I don’t know where they ended up in the move, that ocean horses thing is weird, but it was my grandmother’s and I shouldn’t donate it but sometimes I really think the flood was a good thing…

That only got us as far as the bedroom door.  DJ mostly doesn’t say anything as I stream of consciousness my way down the hallway.  Because he’s my Sir, he has the authority to physically pull me as I try to sidetrack off to check soap and laundry and pictures.  That’s lucky.  Most people wouldn’t have that advantage.  But what I really notice now, I didn’t really process it then, was he listened to me… even as I was wandering off on every tangent imaginable, some of them with logical leaps that made no sense to him and would take me several lines to even write out…  He still listened.  He didn’t engage much, but he would nod or shake his head appropriately, or say, “Later,” or “I’ll take care of it,” when I fixated on a task that needed to be done.  And he managed to do this without making me feel patronized.  He didn’t just nod and smile, he actively listened, even though I’m sure some of the things I said he couldn’t make sense of, the ones that he could, he listened and gave appropriate responses.  But he didn’t go down the rabbit hole with me.  Sometimes people will let me take them down the rabbit hole with me, I’ll say, “Oh, and the pictures, we need more family pictures for the walls” and the person I’m talking with will get into a long and convoluted conversation about how we could get more family pictures on my walls and what would be involved and then I’m just irritated because… my brain has moved on from family pictures, and now they’re being manic right along with me!  DJ kept it very brief and very focused.  And then he shoved me in the shower (cool water, no lights on).

I appreciate that he got me to take my shoes off first.  A couple of times I’ve had wet shoes for three days after a manic episode.

And that mostly got things under control.

Not perfect.  I’m still rapid cycling.  I’m going from mild mania to depression and back multiple times a day.  My time on the computer is about to be cut off because of my mania, but I was feeling isolated and DJ felt like this was the best compromise to let me feel like I had someone to talk to (besides him and sub brother).  And nobody would have to be good at handling my mania.  😉

See… this whole post is mania.  It’s a microcosm!  Of a macrocosm… or something…  It’s totally meta!  (I swear, people at Naropa used that word so much, I don’t even think they knew what it meant… It still annoys me, to this day!)  This is a much more controlled level of mania than the other night, what I described.  I can sort of stay on a topic, there’s basic organization of ideas… There’s some loose spots… I know, cause I could feel them slipping through my fingers as I was writing, but I don’t have enough focus (that fucking word) to find them and fix them… my only hope is to keep going and try to tie the threads together the best I can…

I’m typing very quickly, so much, in fact, that my muscles in my arms are cramping right now, because of pressured speech (which also applies to writing, apparently).  I’m also rocking in my chair and twitching my leg because my psychomotor agitation is running a little high.  When I pause to gather my thoughts, my fingers phantom type random patterns over the tops of the keys…  I am trying to keep my distractability under control but the number of parenthetical asides is a giveaway, besides the overall loose organization of this post.

And Sir is still in here watching me… he’s letting me do this, which is nice, because the computer can increase my agitation because of the pulse rate of the electrical…things… in the screen… even though it’s a flat screen so it’s reduced, but it’s AC, so alternating current, so the electricity pulses… it’s why I can’t do strobe lights, either… like an epileptic.  He’s letting me do this because… compromise for me… feeling isolated and lonely.  Um… bbut it’s probably enough now.  So, I’ll be finished.

Welcome to my world.  🙂  I like to share my insanity.  But also maybe anyone who ever reads this might… know… what it is like inside someone else’s head sometime, and maybe they can be the person who helps and doesn’t shame even without meaning to…  That would be awesome…  Shame sucks.

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