And it has been very long. Very, very long. So long. Long.
I think I am the opposite of most people who deal with manic-depression, but I’m not sure. I try to remember from the zillions of books I read on it, but that was so very long ago. . .
What happens with me is that when I am depressed, time rushes by, but when I am manic, it goes so very, very slowly. Guess what this week turned out to be?
“I blink and half my life is over. . .” ~ Pete Winslow
I have never been a huge poetry-reader, I will confess that now. Mostly I stuck to prose, especially in my younger years. But beginning a poem in an anthology that one of my dearest and my oldest friend brought back to me when she visited the City Lights book store in San Francisco years ago. . . (you know who you are now? hi!). That line began a poem and it jumped out and grabbed me and has stuck with me in a way so many and so few things have.
City Lights possibly might not mean a lot – anything – to some of you, but if you’re familiar with the Beats and specifically Lawrence Ferlinghetti, that’s his. The progression is I spent pretty much all of my teens wildly enamored of Jack Kerouac. I have made good acquaintance with Ginsberg and Cassidy and Burroughs and Holmes and so many more as well, but Kerouac will always be my true love there. We are both “crazy mixed-up Catholic Buddhists,” though I only have a name for it because Jack gave name to it.
Thank you, Jack.
This week was, as I described to my psychiatrist Thursday when I saw him, florrid mania. Psychotic, to boot. But then it had little tiny ultradian cycles woven inside the days and most especially the nights. I would lay in my bed at night, knowing there would be no sleep, listening to music, Thinking, and hallucinating with four out of five senses. Time stretches out for me in a very unreal way. And I lay there and I Thought about so many things. One of them was how I was having my parents drive me to my doctors’ appointments, because I didn’t feel like it was at all safe for me to be behind the wheel of a car. A decade ago that would have been the first place I jumped in that state.
I have slowed down. I have grown older. I have grown wiser. I have grown tired.
(For those of you keeping score, 72 hours awake, 4 of blissful sleep, 16 awake, between 30 minutes and 2 hours asleep – little hazy about what happened there – 14 mostly awake with a wee bit of dozy time, which is not real sleep but is closer to it than anything else I found, 4 of sleep, 6 more awake and that is now. I know. It’s confusing to me, too.)
By Wednesday afternoon I decided the best only course of action for me was to go silent, which I learned by hard lesson is what to do with myself in that state. I stay completely off of the internet, and keep all other interaction very minimal, until I feel like I have most of my judgment returned. If I ever disappear for a long period of time with no notice, that will most likely be why.
Thursday night the mania dissipated (though the insomnia didn’t) in a very nice and novel way. Just a matter of minutes, it was like inside me some dials and slider switches were moved and I was restored to euthymia. Euthymia. Such a pretty word.
I think it was a combination of finding a bit of balance, and some clonazepam (Klonopin) that did it for me. And yesterday morning my doctor wrote me for my favorite sleepies that didn’t kill me but should have (not a botched attempt there, a drug interaction that no one knew about nor figured out for months, despite me repeatedly blacking out – and I was the one who discovered it – but I’m off the other drug), which gave me my four hours of sleep last evening. Which I needed, because while I haven’t come down this time into a full depression – yet – things got pretty desperate for me yesterday.
The wherefore of that is a little hard to explain, but it has to do with the lovely way I have of almost dissociating when I am so long with very little or no sleep and nicely manic, and no longer having that, being fully present in the reality of the moment. And it has to do with how hard I work to insulate my mind, my mental state against anything that might further compromise it, even a little, and coming out of that cocoon-in-a-very-high-tower-with-no-door-and-briars-at-the-bottom. That’s a good one. It not only describes perfectly what I build around myself, but doesn’t it sound pretty much like hell to come out of? It is. I nailed that, and right off the cuff. Love it.
Lastly, my desperate state had to do with one of the many moments of clarity I had while Thinking, actually this one deserves the designation of ‘epiphany’, that I found myself in during the whole episode. I’m saving it for another time. Maybe.
Moral of the story: ”I’m a paranoid schizophrenic. I am my own entourage.” ~ a delightfully misnomered quote, from the always lovable and neurotic John Cusak, in America’s Sweethearts
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May I wish you an uneventful week ahead, for whatever that means?
I appreciate that, but I don’t want uneventful (though I know you meant well). I want the capacity to handle all of the events flawlessly and beautifully once again.
That’s something I’d like back.
That’s something I’ll get back.
That’s something I’m taking back.
(But it still means a lot, thank you.)
hey! I nominated you for the Versatile Blogger Award! If you want to participate my post has the details http://prideinmadness.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/versatile-blogger-award-round-3/
Thanks! I really appreciate you thinking of me. I will check it out just as soon as I can.
Time stretches out for me when manic because I’m moving so fast that everything else is practically in slow motion. Of course, when I’m depressed, time also slows down because I’m so acutely aware of it passing without me getting anything done. Otherwise, time seems to fly, but I don’t think that’s any more than normal. Whatever that is.
Hope the week passes into memory without a resounding crash into depression. Isn’t that what we always hope for?
I have learned to insulate myself when I am super crazy gone psychotic manic. It’s kind of neat, actually, I will continually generate in my brain new ways to keep very, very still and distracted. So I will lay or sit or what-have-you, and especially at night when the world is asleep, I can feel the seconds growing longer. . and longer. . .
I tend to have atypical depression, so I sleep a lot, and that’s good, too. I don’t have to be as aware of it, but then the weeks will drift away from me (“I blink and half my life is over”).
Thank you for your good wishes, Chickadee. Hope, hope. “Unlike me, Linda always hopes.” I honestly am not sure if I hope for anything anymore. It isn’t sad like it sounds, I just mean I anticipate and compensate and navigate the waters I’m in and the waters ahead.
Okay. Maybe it sounds a little sad. But that’s okay, because right now, I’m not!
Aww sweetie, bless you. I cannot even imagine the hell all though our description of it seems so real. Thank you for sharing our very personal struggle.
I don’t have a mental illness, although I do have chronic illness(I think you are privy via my blog) and part of that for me also includes night after night of little to no sleep. I do experience that out of body sense and the world seeming a skewed from sleep deprivation and I know this is just a similar tin miniscule percent of what you deal with.
My point is not to compare, I do hope you trust me on that, my point is to say although I cannot completely understand I think you are one of the most courageous and brilliant souls I have the honor to have met.
You keep working on that detachment when its important, I use this as an emotional barrier in my life and honestly? I wish I’d have learned this at an earlier age.
You humble me~
Dear Baroness, of course I trust you and I’ve missed you and you have completely thrown me for a loop. You are amazing, these words you give me, I am trying and trying to figure out where I put them.
Until I know where they fit inside of me, I’m going to print them out and place them in my planner, in my purse, to read often. I will pull them out and read them and they will pull me up forever, again and again. Thank you. Just thank you.
I hope you are okay yourself. I want to be able to check your blog soon, perhaps I will. But right now I have to be very selfish about where I go and what I do. You understand, I know, because it’s something akin to the spoons you had posted. I tried to come up with a mental illness version of that, but as yet I have not.
And it wasn’t hell, it really wasn’t. There I’ve been, big H. Actually I found some wonderful lovely moments of chasing rainbows in my mind. So it was all worth it.
Know two things:
1) Your words will save me and conpuzzle (word fusion of confuse and puzzle, and a place I love to be in my head) and humble me a million times over again.
2) Ruby’s Only Rule Here: We never compare suffering. No one suffers any more or less, we all just suffer differently. (And I trust you know what I’m doing is agreeing entirely with what you said, “not to compare”. I would never want for you to feel like that was meant to be anything other than empathetic.)
I think you win the award for longest comment reply of the day, but I’m not quite through yet. Be well.
Dearest Ruby,
“Promise me you’ll always remember: You’re braver than you believe, and stronger than you seem, and smarter than you think?” ~. Christopher Robin to Pooh”
I always had this in my children’s bedrooms when they were growing up. It serves them still today as it does me. i want you to print this out as well for a message from me to you.~ Please keep it where you can see it always, at the drop of a notion. You made my year sweet lady knowing that you are pulling for yourself. And always know that though a stranger in some ways I am an old kindred soul who knows you from long ago.
Its people like you are very real and sometimes have a difficult time reconciling that with a world that is less than so.
Knowing that there a person like you who cares enough to wonder where I may be, or how I may be touches me deeply
. You are a rock star in my world Ruby., and you just keep right on rocking in the free world sweetie.
Again, you give me tears, sweet Baroness. Wonderful, beautiful, crystalline tears; each filled with the joy in my heart. I will add this one to the other.
I do think of you. I cannot always be present in This World (blogging, online), but even when I am not I cannot help but think of you and wonder about you and how your garden grows each day, beautiful heart.
Once again, I will most humbly thank you for this.
Sweetie, you so do not need to be part of this blogging world for me to care and wonder how you are. (you can email me
Never any sense of obligation is allowed. That would take away the attraction of online for me. Its okay to be online, or part of what ever until you’re ready Being pushed by others will always set us up for failure. So I don’t do it.
You are there when you are able, when you are “supposed” to be. On your time line, no one else.
OH, and by the way… You Love are so very welcome.
I suppose you are opposite in the way you perceive mania and depression. However, from what I know, you are opposite on a lot of things *smile*. It just adds to your unique nature. Riddle inside of an enigma. All you. All Ruby.
I help the medicine is helping some. I’m glad that doctor finally got the sleepies to you. And I’m thankful that they aren’t deadly in terms of interaction. I’m take a sleepy that is supposed to have a pretty nasty interaction, but does the trick for sleep. I guess it probably has something to do with drug tolerance and metabolism.
Have you found the slightest in relief yet? I hope you have. I want you to have a piece of peace you can call your own.
Lulu, I am wonderful. Been working out a post on the whole thing for two days now, but better things keep getting in the way.
Tomorrow I should have time to buckle down and get to it. For you, dear Lulu, I will try.
Take your time. There isn’t much going on at this camp. I am just working on existing at this point.
Then I definitely think you should read what I wrote. <3