Bipolar Disorder, 2005, Anonymous

From MemoryArchive

Who: Anonymous
What: Bipolar disorder
When: 2005
Where: Washington, DC

As the nurse come to open my door to remind me that I was not allowed to close my door until the doctors gave me the all clear, I was faced with a harsh little dose of reality: “These people think I am f**king crazy and that I am going to kill myself.” Good thing that was impossible with I supposed they had that right, given that I was settling into my room in the psych ward. I sat on my bed and was chipper as a nervous bird until I realized where the f**k I was and I had no idea how it got this far. Twenty minutes previous, I had been seen by the psychiatrist in the ER when I had come to the hospital hoping they would give me a script and I could go home. I knew it was the only way to get drugs since normal doctors want money that I didn’t have. The ER would send me a bill that I could ignore like every other stupid piece of paper that stuffed my mailbox.

But the ER decided that I was entirely too manic too just be handed a script and said they would need to admit me for a few days to get me stable. Being so manic, I was experiencing psychotic symptoms and a few pills and a glass of water were not bringing me back to Happy Boring Normal Land, aka reality. At that level of mania everything is smooth and blurry, but I was lucky to be consistently happy and not fluctuating like the day before where I could be balling one second and just as fast as that started, be hysterically laughing the next. It’s a wild ride. I was also lucky to be an avid researcher of bipolar disorder since I had been diagnosed the previous Spring. I knew something was wrong. I had known something was wrong for a while, but didn’t have the money to get the help I needed. Good luck on finding a free clinic for bipolar people that comes with no strings attached.

Who knows when my bipolar disorder really presented itself. I have a dangerously impulsive personality that often gets me in trouble to begin with and fierce pain-in-the-ass independence that can easily drive anyone up the wall without the addition of a mental illness. So for a while it was hard to draw the line between me and “it”. It is when you begin to draw patterns that you find that I really am nuts, clinically. At the age of 16, my parents decided to send me to a shrink because I was “out of control”. Right. This was code for “we miss the quiet times before she learned to speak or walk and were wondering if we could sedate her.” My dad and I have always and will always clash at extreme levels because he is as big of an asshole as I am. This was blamed on me and off to a shrink I went. They found that I was depressed, which for me meant just extremely pissed off at my parents. Despite the fact that this was a symptom of every other 16 year old I have ever met, it seemed that Prozac was the answer. I refused to take it for a while, but then gave in because I knew it wasn’t going to do anything. A couple months later my friends were concerned because I was not reacting with violence to all of their stupid jokes on me. I didn’t really react to anything. Score one for the conspiracy of “The Man” trying to get me down.

I went to therapy in addition to this and was occasionally allowed to have my parents come in so that we could scream at each other with a referee. Good thing I was a stupid kid and the reason for everyone’s ills in life. After a year or so my parents took me off the drugs because they were too cheap to keep paying for the shrink and it seemed I was cured. The family was “better” and life went on. Coming off of Prozac was a total nightmare and all of my friends became well aware of how nice it was to have me on it. Flash forward a few years to my next desperate need for a pick me up. Life was hard as my parents enjoyed leaving me to pay for school out of pocket in addition to paying for everything else in life like my horse and home. It wasn’t the cake life I saw every other student around me living with all expenses paid existence. I was a zombie. A very hateful zombie. My depression always made me spiteful of everything and everyone around me. I became isolated in my anger and impossible to communicate with. It took me a while to understand what my illness has done to the people around me and how many things I said and did in angry fits that I could never seem to get a handle on. I am the hole that sinks so many ships.

I got back on Prozac from just asking for it from my regular doctor. Bad Idea. Family practice doctors have no business playing with medicines for the mentally ill unless they are already being treated by a psychiatrist. Anti-depressants in bipolar patients often trigger mania unless being given in addition to a mood stabilizer. So off into mania my little self flew. Mania is not only about happy times. It is about fast times. It is like being coked up all the time. Your mind races and thoughts that you think are fantastically intelligent and witty spew from your mouth. You are creative and wise all at the same time. Everyone thinks you’re wild or cool, or at least that’s the impression you get while being absurdly outgoing and obnoxious. It is the part that I stop feeling like that that I end up noticing that I am the biggest ass in the world and should live out my life in bed with this lead weight I now call my skin. Some people get suicidal. I always thought it a waste to beat a dead horse. I was barely breathing most of the time, it seemed, and I always managed to skate through life with that dull useless attitude when the depression hit. It seemed too consuming to go through the process of killing yourself. I also knew deep down that this would either go away or kill me without me having to work for it.

Due to my constant instability in life marked by shitty relationships, shitty homes, numerous shitty restaurant and barn jobs that only kept me poor, I managed to not have consistent Prozac in my life so I was going off and on Prozac for about a year. This made my moods even worse. Then I decided to go off Prozac permanently because I wanted to try ecstasy and found out that E didn’t work if you were on antidepressants. I am quite pleased that I only tried it once, even if it was fabulous. I took acid about 4 or 5 times a year, nothing too bad. I have been smoking pot since I was 17- sometimes heavily, sometimes not at all. I will always smoke pot, even if it is only a few times a year. The heavier drugs depended upon who I was dating at the time, as did smoking. One boyfriend was a bit of a coke head and liked acid, snorting anything you could snort like pain pills, and weed of course. Once we took a bunch of Xanex and snorted heroin, but normally it was just coke. He is a dentist now. Not all drug addicts are on the street. He was a total motherf**ker and we fought like feral cats. Things like this do not add to my stability.

When I met my husband, I had just finished one of my post-breakup drunken sex rampages that came with the mania of freedom and my need to be impulsive in all that I did. He was in the Air Force and I guess that is what I needed. My parents were in another one of those “you are not my child” phases and I was excited with prospect of being able to tell my ex-Marine father that I was dating the military. I was not only dating him, in fact, I had fallen madly in love with him and the night after our one-night-stand had decided to marry him. Seven months later to the day, we were married. 2 days later I moved my life off to a base out West because he was all the Prozac I would ever need. Right. No matter how upset I was, I couldn’t help but be calmed by him. After getting my diagnosis and researching bipolar, I learned about triggers. I learned about simple things that can start and stop mania and depression and angry fits. My husband, at least before we got married, triggered my sanity. After we got married he triggered many horrible things. 9/11 was the beginning of the end as the stress in our lives on base was enough to break any marriage.

During our marriage I started to see a shrink to get some Prozac since I was miserable and cried all day in my new happy married home. Prozac for the first time made me completely numb to the point of depression that didn’t bother me enough to make me cry. My husband was a bit disappointed when his new wife not only refused to be touched, but would rather sleep than have sex with him. He was eager for me to get off the Prozac. So then the shrink thought that maybe a mood stabilizer would do some good. This is the first time that anyone mentioned the possibility of bipolar disorder. I thought he was nuts. My father is bipolar and I was quite sure I was not as crazy as that bastard. So I was on Neurontin and hated every second of it. It is an anti-seizure medication, as many mood stabilizers are, and the weird wobbliness that it gave me was enough to make me nauseas to the point that I gave up on it. I figured it was a super sign that since it didn’t work (not that I gave it the slightest chance to), that I surely could not be bipolar. Whew! They then put me on Paxil and once again the antidepressant sent me into a fabulous mania. While my husband was a raging asshole from being a slave to the military after 9/11, I was a perky little bird with a strong belief in the good of all things. It was really disgusting. Either way, he wasn’t getting laid and I didn’t care. By that point I had finally made friends and was drinking pretty heavily and my neighbor and I were getting stoned with some pot I got off base. Everything was super except my husband trying to keep me within some regulatory confines that just weren’t working for me. Again, it is hard to say if our fighting was the result of my mental shit, or my naturally difficult personality, but it seems that the combination of the two plus a very stressed out and very unhappy husband ended up being the demise of my marriage. I left in August and we were divorced in January.

In my new home during the divorce at my parents place in the South, I found a nice 16-year old boy who cleaned stalls at my barn to be my new sex toy. Yes, statutory rape came to mind, but he didn’t look that young and I made him super cool with his friends. It seemed like a good deal. He adored me, was easily trainable, and the whole thing was just stupid and impulsive enough to be a good time and a cool story. After all, my life ends up as a series of events that at the time I thought were cool stories and, now that I am medicated, I find that most were just dumb ideas at best. My friends were convinced I was on some pretty hard drugs given my behavior with this very young boy, but they had never known me to be anything approaching stable. During the earlier days of the divorce, I was so happy to have my freedom and be free of the BS of fighting with my husband. Being held accountable for my actions makes me insane. I absolutely hate the idea of a ruling authority over my daily actions.

However, I also was insane with anger at this time. I was explosive far beyond reason and even people at my barn who I had known for many years were completely terrified of me. I was utterly unbearable unless I was getting laid, drunk, or high and then I was just giddy to another really f**king annoying level. I was so excited with the prospect that men could hit on me, especially since when I left the town 5 years previously I was a frumpy prude and I returned with long, platinum blonde hair, a short skirt, and an overtly sexual attitude that for the first time in my life had those stupid bastards standing in line. I was loving it and was completely out of my mind. It wasn’t until my diagnosis and subsequent research that I learned what my brain was doing at the time and that being a whore seemed to be a common symptom.

I finally started dating a really amazing guy who finally got me relatively grounded just out of the fact that he was such a great person to be around. I still went out with the girls Saturday night and to “my bar” every Sunday night alone and played my stupid game and he never complained once about me going out like that. He was home asleep, knowing I would be home when I could. Soon my depression came again and this time, it wasn’t going to leave, ever. After the divorce was final and I came to the conclusion that the downfall was something about me that I could never change. I found that I was full of these horrible personality traits that were not changeable, but were pieces of me like spleen and my toes. Not only that, but I realized that I was totally full of shit. This was that depression that is based on a life of mania and anger that comes from a pompous self-righteous attitude that eventually hits a wall and you realize what is real and what is not. Everything that came before that depression was a f**king lie. I was wrong about everything I had said or done or wanted and believed. It was a dirty rotten lie. Now I was left with nothing. I was left with a lump of used up worthless flesh. I found that this made it difficult to do anything. Anything. I couldn’t communicate with anyone because they wouldn’t understand what a horrible person I am. They would think I was being “silly” and that I needed to snap out of it. My mom was convinced that I just wasn’t eating right when I told her that I knew that something was horribly wrong with me and I needed to see a doctor. They didn’t see the truth. They just wouldn’t get it. My boyfriend never really got it, but he was completely understanding and supportive beyond what any human should have been. He also became one who me and my disease have destroyed.

When I first moved back to my hometown during the divorce, I became pretty badly bulimic. The food in the South was absurdly full of fat and grease and I refused to take part in getting fat like everyone else there. My parents shoved this food down my throat and I reacted with my finger down my throat. They never knew, despite the weight I was losing. It’s amazing how addictive something so gross can become. My boyfriend eventually found out about this little pastime of mine and did all he could to stop it. He is one of only 2 people who know to this day- my ex-husband being the other. It comes and goes and always will, but it never will disappear from my life. They say the same about heroin.

After the semester ended, I was forced to start work after taking the semester off of useless slavery. I started working at a restaurant and was sucked into all the shit that restaurants dredge up like drugs and partying. I had taken so much time off from partying while I was busy wanting to die, so I relied upon my mania to pull me out of my shell. While I loved my boyfriend, I hated stability. I was planning on leaving to move to DC for school and knew he would never come with me. I got stuck wanting a new toy and after writing such thoughts in an email to a friend my boyfriend managed to hack into my email and find his girlfriends wandering thoughts. The one person I should never have hurt. The abortion didn’t help. He was destroyed. I was not bothered by it until I moved to DC and things really went from a nightmare to the pit of hell and I blamed it all on being punished for hurting him. Soon after I broke up with Mr. Perfect I was off playing with some stupid surfer boy who was again far too young for me. I was trapped and needed to get out as fast as possible and I was going to run over whoever got in my way. And I did.

My move to DC came with no support, financial or emotional, and I was very much on my own drinking my way through my first month as I slept in random places including the school parking garage waiting for my financial aid that took 2 months to arrive. I lost a good bit of weight I never had to lose in the first month and I was nothing but a stick figure. My parents wouldn’t talk to me for the fact that I left without their blessing and they never seemed bothered by the fact that I was sleeping in a parking garage and taking “showers” in office bathrooms in the wee hours of the morning. Somehow through all of this I managed to end up at a visit to my ex-husband that turned into 9 months of dating. In the meantime, I was more depressed than I had ever been and in my 2-hour car rides per day I would cry uncontrollably wondering what the f**k I had done. I would have cried harder had I known what was to come.

I got a job and a house with the job and I was ecstatic about the prospect of a bed of my own and not having to drive around with all of my belongings anymore. Everything was perfect for a while and I was a happy stable person for a period. Then came December and January and it became quite clear that fine was not an adjective for me or anything around me. What bothers me the most about my disorder is that it is not only mine. I am only the epicenter. The aftershocks and tremors are felt all around me. The closer you are to me, the worse it gets. It became completely impossible for me to communicate in any sane manner. I was abusive to everyone or I was flighty like a monkey on crack and no one could understand me. My ideas and conversations were so random and my attacks became so personal. I should not have been allowed out of my room. It came to a point where I was not functioning at all. I couldn’t read or write or drive or talk. It was messy. I was also poor and getting help seems to be for people with money. Poor people are only crazy because getting help to not be crazy is too f**king expensive. One day I said “f**k it” and I went the counseling center at school and I told them that I needed to see a shrink. Today. So somehow I got the number of a shrink who saw me the next day and $250 later I was certifiably nuts.

Getting the diagnosis was probably the easiest part. I was elated that I had a “disorder”. I was so proud to be something. This meant drugs. Drugs to fix me. Whoopie! Granted, I though he was a quack for even diagnosing me bipolar. Again, crazy people are bipolar.

That’s not me. I just have problems. Right.

I took Lamictal for a few months and made it through the semester, but not without losing my job and my house, throwing the psychotic fit of the century at my 25th birthday party, and breaking up with my ex-husband. I got another job which I was fired from rather quickly (my “attitude problem” doesn’t work with waiting tables or dealing with authority) and had to stop taking my meds because I had no money. Bad idea. Here came the drunken drugging sex rampage of my life in too small of a town that ended with me sleeping in my car at the barn I worked at and living off of random scraps from people. It didn’t take me too long to realize what had happened, but I was still the impulsive party girl who just didn’t care.

That high speed intensity I had grown accustomed to being helpful in my schoolwork had turned into a psychotic and uncontrollable circus in my head. I could no longer read. I couldn’t understand what people were saying anymore. I couldn’t take notes. I couldn’t write. I am a very good student. This should never happen to me. But there came midterms and I realized that I had not read a single thing all semester. I then went from laughing to crying and major mania to deciding that I needed help immediately. I went to the counseling center at school and asked for help. They didn’t seem to understand how grave the situation had become and were not very helpful other than to tell me which hospital was closest and let me know my insurance would cover it. I went back and forth to my car and library and had no f**king clue where the hell I was going. So I called my ex-husband who was smart enough to ask me to come to his place and we would go to the hospital the next day. This was the plan. And thus I ended up at the hospital. They were very nice and they gave me Ativan whenever I wanted it and we had group therapy and took walks once I was allowed to leave the locked ward on the 4th day. I learned a lot there. I was happy to learn that there are people far crazier than me. Being around them made me more sane. I’ve always had the reaction to completely drop down a level or two when someone else is in a worse situation.

But I also learned about suicidal people. I would get so mad at them when they would say how they had a plan to die. This was especially annoying when I would see 10 people come visit them 2 times a day. The only reason I went to the hospital where my ex-husband lived was because I knew there was no one else who would visit me. Bipolar disorder can be very isolating. But I told the suicidal ones in group therapy that I would despise myself if I ever was dumb enough to want to die because I know full well that no matter how bad it may seem in these situations that we were all drowning in, it is never that bad. It is never permanent. It is never as real as we think it is and I will never be as weak as suicide would make me.

So a week later I was out and they taught me that needed to be on much more medication and I learned what hell that really meant. Lithium made me sick forever. It made me sick and then it made me gain weight. And then it made my skin breakout really badly. And then it made me shake. And now all it does to me after one year is make me boring, uncreative, and dull. Most days I am a drone. I also take Seroquel and I was on Lamictal again, but now do not take it. It was a drastic change to go from Ms. TNT to being unable to be angry and unable to be happy and unable to laugh. Every laugh and every smile was a lie. Things are much better now since I have been on it for so long, but I am still a different person. I still long for the crazy days and the bountiful creativity. Just before my hospitalization, I had written 20 pages single-spaced on my imaginary boyfriend that really wasn’t half bad. He was and is too sexy and I decided that since I was unable to have a real boyfriend since I suffered from an “alternative” and terrifying mindset, I could take someone who looks like my type on the outside and create him on the inside exactly how I needed him to be. I was a bit of a stalker, but he was my literary muse and I was just not destined to talk with him face to face. We talked on the phone once, but I was already numbed by Lithium by then and it didn’t do what I had always hoped for.

I have been consistently medicated for bipolar disorder for over a year and I know I cannot go back. It is temping so that I can write again like I miss so much, but I will have no friends and will be nonfunctional again. I am terrified that I will get worse if I come off of the drugs. I love the highs, but no one else gets what the hell I am talking about then. I isolate myself even when I am around so many people. Then there is the depression that is unbearable. I know I give suicide so much shit, but it sure as shit has crossed my mind on some very dark occasions that completely took over my body and mind. I know I can be impulsive and bitchy and full of attitude on my medication. I do not need some mental illness to help me with that and I will never find a drug to suppress it. I have my moods on my drugs and I know they will off the charts if I am off of them. I think I have tested my friends enough. My family is more helpful since the hospital. They are terrified I will kill myself and blame them. But they do pay for my drugs. I have put them through a lot too. I haven’t had a boyfriend in years and I intend to keep it that way. It is not worth the pain I can cause them. My friends are minimal though very supportive and understanding. I believe in a way that I should go through this alone, but I am grateful for those who stand by me regardless of the shit I throw their way.

What I have done to myself: equally huge amounts of drugs and sex, financially f**king myself for life, dug a hole so deep for myself most days that I will be lucky to ever grab the edge to peek over into a life that I know someone else must be enjoying.

What I have done to others: terrified them, isolated myself from a family that may or may not have been bothered by that, dragged boyfriends and a husband through the shit I have created, added enormous amounts of chaos, drama, and pain to lives that would otherwise be calm and happy.

What I will have to live with: the difficulty of keeping relationships knowing how much my illness can hurt people, the knowledge that the fight is far from over and everyday is a an opportunity for either great things or a motherf**king nightmare, though with drugs there is a chance for something safely in between- however boring that may be.

What I have to look forward to: being normal is extremely dull and I am lucky enough to know that I will never get to that point, no matter how many drugs I am on; bipolar people are often very creative in writing, music and art (think Beethoven, Van Gogh, Hemingway); we are blessed with the ability to see things from the outside and analyze things from a perspective that many are unable to see because we will always be on the outside, even when we are with other people on the outside; Consistency is the final refuge of the unimaginative and I refuse to ever be described as either consistent of unimaginative; I have the distinct pleasure to learn to ride the waves, or let them drown me and the challenge of that alone is an exciting reason to be grateful for being bipolar.