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annwfynThis is vague navel gazing about what I mean when I use various MH terms.
It’s probably quite boring. Mostly written because I was pondering how annoying it is that most of the terminology is so subjective and could mean anything from ‘I’m moping – I can pull myself together’ to ‘asking me to leave the house is like asking me to climb Mount Everest’. You could skip this. You probably should. Or you can post up your own scale of MH woes. Tis up to you.
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Anxiety. Anxiety is a thing that I differentiate from panic. A panic attack or panic feelings I will deal with later. Anxiety covers a kind of sweeping sense of being overwhelmed, along with a sharp jaggy compulsion to do _something_ that feels even more overwhelming. So, the anxiety might start with a sense that I should be cleaning the house. I’m not cleaning the house. The house is messy. This is a massive overwhelming failure of mine and makes me a useless person.
While I’m feeling like this I tend to flap, I talk too quickly, I scurry, and sometimes I say stupid things – I might snap, I might try and be witty and be offensive instead, I might just start apologizing over and over again. I might go completely silent or I might run away and hide. It’s not great, but the chief risk at this stage is that I embarrass myself hideously.
If I’m lucky, it stops there. I manage to get myself to sit down and breathe (which fixes a lot of stuff) or someone distracts me or gives me a hug. Often doing something physical helps a lot (doing something physical helps 99.9% of my MH woes). If not, it may escalate to stage 2 anxiety.
Stage 2 anxiety is when I start to spiral. To use my cleaning analogy, I begin to really worry about the house. The house being unclean is something everyone is judging me for. This is awful. I should never have let it get into this state. I am angry with myself. I want to hurt myself for having failed, for having been such a disgusting person. I have to make this better. Better now. At this point, I’m adding in ridiculous new demands – I can’t just hoover. I have to hoover, dust and clean the ceiling and if I don’t, that means I’m a foul worthless person who will never have any friends and will die alone. I deserve to die alone.
At this point I need to stop doing whatever I am doing entirely and get a clean break. Or I need to sit down and cry. I used to self harm to snap myself out of this but I’m trying to stop that. But it’s getting harder to manage at this point and the anxiety is at risk of spiralling to stage 3.
Stage 3 anxiety happens less often than it used to. It’s very very common when I’m not well. It’s very uncommon if I’m generally well, as at this point the anxiety is spiralling into proper crazy. This is when I start to build up stupid cascade failure scenarios in my brain. If I don’t clean the house, Jez will die and it will be all my fault. If I don’t clean the house I have failed at a basic moral task and I would be better off dead. If I can’t clean the entire house, including the ceiling, within the next hour, then someone I love will die. I usually start hissing obscenities at myself, just to get them out of my brain where they are building up – “bitch. Cunt. Whore”. I don’t know why it’s always those words and for things that are really mundane. But I do. Other examples of stage 3 anxiety include me pulling out my hair on the way to a LRP event because I was freaking out at the fact that the people there wanted me to kill myself, and were angry that I hadn’t, and curling up in a ball in a garden centre car park because I thought I was responsible for a friend of mine dying.
At this stage, I cannot work through the anxiety. Asking me to do this is much like asking me to climb Mount Everest. I can’t. Self harm is not a safe solution as I am likely to actually damage myself – all I want to do is bash my head against a wall or pull my hair out to punish myself for the horrific things I think I’ve done. This, by the way, is the pattern that made one psychiatrist talk about OCD – she thought my high anxiety pattern tips into OCD, but other psychiatrists have said that as these episodes tend to always be co-morbid with a bipolar episode it’s more likely to be a symptom of that. And maybe shouldn’t be in the same place as the low level fretful anxiety I get at stage 1 or 2, but I have as stage 3 anxiety episodes always start with a stage 1 or 2 and so I think are a bipolar fuelled exaggeration of them.
When I get to this state I often need removed from the environment by someone I trust and made to sit down for a while. These episodes, by the way, are Jez’s least favourite thing in the world.
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Panic. Panic is something that happens when I’m either suffering from a depressive or mixed manic episode. They sometimes happen as an end point of an anxiety attack, but often come out of the blue like some kind of malevolent steam train.
A panic attack is a physical thing. Totally physical. It isn’t ‘I feel scared’. It’s ‘my arms and legs have shut down and I can’t breathe and I may or may not be able to see’. There is usually a specific trigger to this and then I go.
The last panic attack I had was when I got to Empire a while ago and found that I’d got there too late to take my tent onto the field and I thought I’d have to spend a weekend without it. I remember trying to hand money to the person on the gate but I was having trouble feeling my hands and it turned into something resembling a throw/drop. It wasn’t pretty. I somehow got the car through the gate and then got out and said “I need to go for a run” but only made it to the side of the path by the main drive up and keeled over.
I ended up lying in the grass, staring at the sky, trying to focus on making oxygen happen, while not really being able to feel my hands or legs.
I sometimes get an adrenaline jag as well and run until my legs give way. That is not something I am entirely in control of. It’s when I get a massive hit of adrenaline and need it out of my system.
Panic attacks don’t happen often. They mostly happen when I’m unwell (when stuff happens like ‘I go foetal in the middle of Baker Street Tube Station’) or very occasionally when I hit one of a number of triggers, most of which are stupid things, but make me feel out of control and remind me strongly of previous major episodes.
These are genuinely beyond my control. I am so sorry. I’ve tried to work through them. It makes them worse. If one is coming on, running away and hiding is the best thing I can do as otherwise I will either keel over in silence, or I will start screaming and rocking and then keel over. The screaming and rocking only ever happens when I’m in the middle of a major bipolar episode. The stopping breathing and keeling over happen sometimes if a trigger goes off.
There is no fix beyond my getting myself/someone getting me somewhere where I won’t be hit with cars and waiting for it to pass.
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Depression. Depression has been on my mind lately as I’ve realized recently that I have spent a lot more of my adult life depressed than I ever knew. And, in fact, recent studies suggest that what I thought was my baseline is actually mild to moderate depression and what I thought was a stage one hypomanic episode is actually my baseline.
Which is very exciting news!
Depression for me isn’t actually much to do with sorrow. I mean, I feel sorrow, like any human being, but I don’t feel _sad_ when depressed. I feel tired. I mean, I also start getting anxiety attacks, and panic attacks and I get sick much more easily. I get overwhelmed by things I could normally handle. I start wanting to avoid people. The more introverted I seem, the more depressed I am.
I also get tired. I want to sleep more. Doing multiple things exhausts me. I am very easily distracted and struggle to concentrate on much. I need to spend more time staring into space.
I fear water. And dirt no longer bothers me.
The keynote message of seriously depressed Sally is ‘if you’re shit at your job, or a hobby, or cooking or something, you get to stop doing it. Why can’t I stop living?’
I’m not aggressively suicidal. I’m just exhausted by life and living and wish constantly that I could just fade out of existence. Of course, the danger is that I sometimes spike into anxiety which is when I think I’m so terrible I should kill myself.
I also can spiral into long weird periods when I obsess about whether I’m good or evil. I make lists, trying to balance my good deeds with my evil deeds. The endless maths are because, of course, if I’m evil, I need to kill myself. I need to be punished. I have to prove my right to live. This is maybe wobbling towards a mixed affective state, but those particular maths normally involve more anxiety about whether I’ve killed someone. Killing people is a constant anxiety of mine. I’m not sure why.
I get lurid dreams when I’m depressed which it takes me forever to realize weren’t real when I wake up. Going back to my obsession with killing people – I once spent an hour searching my house for a body I thought I’d hidden there before I realized there was no body, it had all been a dream and I was late for work.
Depression also tends to take a really physical form with me. I’m pretty sure that at least two of my diagnosed bouts of labyrinthitis were actually depression as I could walk around the house fine. But if I tried to walk down the stairs to the front door it would hit like a steam train. Dizziness and fatigue are a major major thing. When it’s really bad, I struggle sitting upright on the sofa for long periods as it’s too much like work.
I can get paranoid. Very paranoid. Sometimes it’s normal paranoia like ‘everyone hates me – I better avoid them all’. Sometimes it’s massive nasty paranoia like ‘the people on the station want to kill me and may push me under a train’.
Nothing tastes right. Which means I either gain weight as I eat a shed load of food, trying to find the right flavours, or I lose a shed load as I can’t be bothered with any of it. But food tasting funny is a major sign that I’m not well. Sometimes, when I’m really bad, the rest of my senses go funny too and I smell odd stuff and things feel weird against my skin.
This doesn’t all happen all the time, of course. There’s a 1-10 scale. Apparently I’ve spent most of my life at a 1-3 and thought I was just lazy and bad at concentrating.
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Hypomania/mania. I am very bad at writing about this as I’m never sure I believe in it afterwards. Also, it’s comparatively rare (which is why I am currently classed as type 2 bipolar. Or was. I think I might be type 1 after the last slightly weird episode. It changes. But basically, I spend more time depressed than high and the epic psychotic highs don’t come more than every few years or more). So I don’t know this state as intimately as others.
Plus I have complicated mixed feelings about it all. I mean, let’s be honest, low level hypomania is nice. Even higher level has some good bits. But let’s try and be factual here.
Hypomania involves a lot of restless energy, fragmented attention, and an inability to sleep. If I wake up at 6 am and need to walk in circles around the living room talking to myself, while the TV blasts old episodes of LA Law which send me spinning off in a dozen different amazing directions, that’s a sign.
(That was the summer in Queen of Denmark Court. I had philosophical arguments with Tommy-Leo-McGarry-Lawyer at 6 am while circling. I couldn’t sit down though. Had to keep walking).
I have taken up running multiple times in my life. I’ve only ever seemed to succeed during hypomanic episodes when I’ve sometimes run until my legs gave way and then realized I was ages from home and needed to get back. I’ve done that barefoot and realized my feet were bleeding and I was lost somewhere in the Pyranees and needed to get back to the holiday house and I had no idea how. I do like to move when high. I used to sometimes decide to go traveling and fare dodge across the country.
I get angry. Stupidly angry. Angry over tiny things. I’ve screamed in Ginnie’s face and then run out of the house to sprint myself tired because she asked me to put chopping knives point down in the dishwasher. I’ve thrown a scrabble board across the room over a losing game. I’ve thrown plates at Jez’s head because they were dirty and I was having washing up rage. Well, plates at the wall near Jez’s head. Either way, it’s really not OK and I know it’s not OK.
There is a terrifying violence in me during these times. This is actually why I started self-harming – I trained myself to always take the violence out on me, not on anyone else. Then I trained myself to try and autopilot for keys or something to smash into my arm and not a knife as the knife cuts tend to be too deep.
Keys just scratch and bruise mostly.
I get weird obsessions and vanish into them for days, I’m told. They always seem very rational and logical to me. But Jez says I’m a nightmare – he can’t touch me unless he’s willing to engage with whatever I’ve decided will hold my attention. Then I ditch it, just as suddenly. I think the hypersexuality comes from this, actually. I’ve never been the kind of person who has mad one night stands with loads of people. Rather, I tend to suddenly find someone totally random completely entrancing and the best thing ever. Sometimes for really weird reasons. Something that came up a couple of times when I was a student was this complete conviction I had that I could see this mystic pattern of life and narrative and story. Like…there was a pattern underlying reality and that pattern created romance and true love and fairy stories. But because I could see if, I had a weird compulsion to engage with the pattern if I saw a slot I could step into. Like…if someone was flirting with me, I could see them taking the first steps in The Dance (capital letters) which was a part of the pattern and I had to play my part and take the matching steps.
Which meant completely reinventing myself to be the True Love of whoever was Dancing with me, and being totally in love with them in return. I called it ‘touching the fairytale’ and it felt like a compulsion. It didn’t matter if I was in a monogamous relationship with someone else. I had to follow The Dance.
This then, very awkwardly, would come to an end as the episode would crash into depression, and I’d wake up one morning, feeling like shit, and suddenly painfully aware that I’d trashed my life, messed up a relationship and had sex with someone I DID NOT EVEN FANCY. The last bit, by the way, feels truly horrific. Almost like I’d been sexually assaulted, except I’d enthusiastically consented at the time. I felt violated by my own mad self. I don’t know if that is deeply insulting to victims of assault, but I have been one of those two and the two felt very similar, but with added self-recrimination when it was the madness to blame.
Sometimes, of course, the weird ideas are nice. My last odd episode was at the start of 2018 when I started seeing this weird god figure I called ‘the Hunter’ who was probably a bit like Herne the Hunter and I thought was there to watch over me. Which wouldn’t be the first time when I was having those episodes. That felt pretty comforting, especially as everything else was shit then, and I rather miss him.
The difference between mania, and hypomania, I’m told, is that if you know that what you’re experiencing probably isn’t real, it’s hypomania. I’m just going to say that I am unconvinced it’s a clear division. One of my nastiest episodes involved my swinging back and forth, multiple times in a day, as to whether the spirit living inside my chest trying to get me to carve myself open was real or not. I could sit in a meeting with a CPN and agree he was definitely not real but then walk into the toilet, and stare at myself in the mirror and all I could see was him.
But that was “just hypomania”. In which case it’s bloody hard work.
This sort of happens on a 1-10 scale, but I basically never stay at the extreme ends for long periods. I escalate past 1 and up to about 4-6 very quickly and I peak above 6 for a couple of days really. I’ve never hallucinated for more than three weeks. It’s all short intense bursts of crazy. But quite memorable.
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Mixed states. This is either dysphoric mania or agitated depression. Psychiatrists tell me different things. I’m not sure it matters. Imagine taking hypomania/mania and depression and squishing them together so you feel horrific and hate yourself and are getting psychic messages telling you to jump off the Clyde Bridge to purge the world and the only reason you aren’t is that the sodding Clyde Bridge doesn’t bloody well exist and the psychic messages are very specific.
I mean, for example. You know. If you want to.
These episodes are my bane. I do not like them. They happen more often than nice mania which is sucky.
I feel like I may have picked the wrong version of insanity.
1-10 scale as per usual. Lasts longer than mania, not as long as depression. Routine, distraction, recognising patterns and moving away from the bad stuff and distracting myself with something physical is super effective at keeping the worst of the absolute lunacy at bay. Mostly, medication, routine, regular exercise, going outside, keeping a tidy house and eating right keeps it all in check. And sometimes it rushes in like a tsunami and I just need to deal with what I have.
Goodness, this is very long. I’ll post it anyway.
It’s probably quite boring. Mostly written because I was pondering how annoying it is that most of the terminology is so subjective and could mean anything from ‘I’m moping – I can pull myself together’ to ‘asking me to leave the house is like asking me to climb Mount Everest’. You could skip this. You probably should. Or you can post up your own scale of MH woes. Tis up to you.
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*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
Anxiety. Anxiety is a thing that I differentiate from panic. A panic attack or panic feelings I will deal with later. Anxiety covers a kind of sweeping sense of being overwhelmed, along with a sharp jaggy compulsion to do _something_ that feels even more overwhelming. So, the anxiety might start with a sense that I should be cleaning the house. I’m not cleaning the house. The house is messy. This is a massive overwhelming failure of mine and makes me a useless person.
While I’m feeling like this I tend to flap, I talk too quickly, I scurry, and sometimes I say stupid things – I might snap, I might try and be witty and be offensive instead, I might just start apologizing over and over again. I might go completely silent or I might run away and hide. It’s not great, but the chief risk at this stage is that I embarrass myself hideously.
If I’m lucky, it stops there. I manage to get myself to sit down and breathe (which fixes a lot of stuff) or someone distracts me or gives me a hug. Often doing something physical helps a lot (doing something physical helps 99.9% of my MH woes). If not, it may escalate to stage 2 anxiety.
Stage 2 anxiety is when I start to spiral. To use my cleaning analogy, I begin to really worry about the house. The house being unclean is something everyone is judging me for. This is awful. I should never have let it get into this state. I am angry with myself. I want to hurt myself for having failed, for having been such a disgusting person. I have to make this better. Better now. At this point, I’m adding in ridiculous new demands – I can’t just hoover. I have to hoover, dust and clean the ceiling and if I don’t, that means I’m a foul worthless person who will never have any friends and will die alone. I deserve to die alone.
At this point I need to stop doing whatever I am doing entirely and get a clean break. Or I need to sit down and cry. I used to self harm to snap myself out of this but I’m trying to stop that. But it’s getting harder to manage at this point and the anxiety is at risk of spiralling to stage 3.
Stage 3 anxiety happens less often than it used to. It’s very very common when I’m not well. It’s very uncommon if I’m generally well, as at this point the anxiety is spiralling into proper crazy. This is when I start to build up stupid cascade failure scenarios in my brain. If I don’t clean the house, Jez will die and it will be all my fault. If I don’t clean the house I have failed at a basic moral task and I would be better off dead. If I can’t clean the entire house, including the ceiling, within the next hour, then someone I love will die. I usually start hissing obscenities at myself, just to get them out of my brain where they are building up – “bitch. Cunt. Whore”. I don’t know why it’s always those words and for things that are really mundane. But I do. Other examples of stage 3 anxiety include me pulling out my hair on the way to a LRP event because I was freaking out at the fact that the people there wanted me to kill myself, and were angry that I hadn’t, and curling up in a ball in a garden centre car park because I thought I was responsible for a friend of mine dying.
At this stage, I cannot work through the anxiety. Asking me to do this is much like asking me to climb Mount Everest. I can’t. Self harm is not a safe solution as I am likely to actually damage myself – all I want to do is bash my head against a wall or pull my hair out to punish myself for the horrific things I think I’ve done. This, by the way, is the pattern that made one psychiatrist talk about OCD – she thought my high anxiety pattern tips into OCD, but other psychiatrists have said that as these episodes tend to always be co-morbid with a bipolar episode it’s more likely to be a symptom of that. And maybe shouldn’t be in the same place as the low level fretful anxiety I get at stage 1 or 2, but I have as stage 3 anxiety episodes always start with a stage 1 or 2 and so I think are a bipolar fuelled exaggeration of them.
When I get to this state I often need removed from the environment by someone I trust and made to sit down for a while. These episodes, by the way, are Jez’s least favourite thing in the world.
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Panic. Panic is something that happens when I’m either suffering from a depressive or mixed manic episode. They sometimes happen as an end point of an anxiety attack, but often come out of the blue like some kind of malevolent steam train.
A panic attack is a physical thing. Totally physical. It isn’t ‘I feel scared’. It’s ‘my arms and legs have shut down and I can’t breathe and I may or may not be able to see’. There is usually a specific trigger to this and then I go.
The last panic attack I had was when I got to Empire a while ago and found that I’d got there too late to take my tent onto the field and I thought I’d have to spend a weekend without it. I remember trying to hand money to the person on the gate but I was having trouble feeling my hands and it turned into something resembling a throw/drop. It wasn’t pretty. I somehow got the car through the gate and then got out and said “I need to go for a run” but only made it to the side of the path by the main drive up and keeled over.
I ended up lying in the grass, staring at the sky, trying to focus on making oxygen happen, while not really being able to feel my hands or legs.
I sometimes get an adrenaline jag as well and run until my legs give way. That is not something I am entirely in control of. It’s when I get a massive hit of adrenaline and need it out of my system.
Panic attacks don’t happen often. They mostly happen when I’m unwell (when stuff happens like ‘I go foetal in the middle of Baker Street Tube Station’) or very occasionally when I hit one of a number of triggers, most of which are stupid things, but make me feel out of control and remind me strongly of previous major episodes.
These are genuinely beyond my control. I am so sorry. I’ve tried to work through them. It makes them worse. If one is coming on, running away and hiding is the best thing I can do as otherwise I will either keel over in silence, or I will start screaming and rocking and then keel over. The screaming and rocking only ever happens when I’m in the middle of a major bipolar episode. The stopping breathing and keeling over happen sometimes if a trigger goes off.
There is no fix beyond my getting myself/someone getting me somewhere where I won’t be hit with cars and waiting for it to pass.
*
Depression. Depression has been on my mind lately as I’ve realized recently that I have spent a lot more of my adult life depressed than I ever knew. And, in fact, recent studies suggest that what I thought was my baseline is actually mild to moderate depression and what I thought was a stage one hypomanic episode is actually my baseline.
Which is very exciting news!
Depression for me isn’t actually much to do with sorrow. I mean, I feel sorrow, like any human being, but I don’t feel _sad_ when depressed. I feel tired. I mean, I also start getting anxiety attacks, and panic attacks and I get sick much more easily. I get overwhelmed by things I could normally handle. I start wanting to avoid people. The more introverted I seem, the more depressed I am.
I also get tired. I want to sleep more. Doing multiple things exhausts me. I am very easily distracted and struggle to concentrate on much. I need to spend more time staring into space.
I fear water. And dirt no longer bothers me.
The keynote message of seriously depressed Sally is ‘if you’re shit at your job, or a hobby, or cooking or something, you get to stop doing it. Why can’t I stop living?’
I’m not aggressively suicidal. I’m just exhausted by life and living and wish constantly that I could just fade out of existence. Of course, the danger is that I sometimes spike into anxiety which is when I think I’m so terrible I should kill myself.
I also can spiral into long weird periods when I obsess about whether I’m good or evil. I make lists, trying to balance my good deeds with my evil deeds. The endless maths are because, of course, if I’m evil, I need to kill myself. I need to be punished. I have to prove my right to live. This is maybe wobbling towards a mixed affective state, but those particular maths normally involve more anxiety about whether I’ve killed someone. Killing people is a constant anxiety of mine. I’m not sure why.
I get lurid dreams when I’m depressed which it takes me forever to realize weren’t real when I wake up. Going back to my obsession with killing people – I once spent an hour searching my house for a body I thought I’d hidden there before I realized there was no body, it had all been a dream and I was late for work.
Depression also tends to take a really physical form with me. I’m pretty sure that at least two of my diagnosed bouts of labyrinthitis were actually depression as I could walk around the house fine. But if I tried to walk down the stairs to the front door it would hit like a steam train. Dizziness and fatigue are a major major thing. When it’s really bad, I struggle sitting upright on the sofa for long periods as it’s too much like work.
I can get paranoid. Very paranoid. Sometimes it’s normal paranoia like ‘everyone hates me – I better avoid them all’. Sometimes it’s massive nasty paranoia like ‘the people on the station want to kill me and may push me under a train’.
Nothing tastes right. Which means I either gain weight as I eat a shed load of food, trying to find the right flavours, or I lose a shed load as I can’t be bothered with any of it. But food tasting funny is a major sign that I’m not well. Sometimes, when I’m really bad, the rest of my senses go funny too and I smell odd stuff and things feel weird against my skin.
This doesn’t all happen all the time, of course. There’s a 1-10 scale. Apparently I’ve spent most of my life at a 1-3 and thought I was just lazy and bad at concentrating.
*
Hypomania/mania. I am very bad at writing about this as I’m never sure I believe in it afterwards. Also, it’s comparatively rare (which is why I am currently classed as type 2 bipolar. Or was. I think I might be type 1 after the last slightly weird episode. It changes. But basically, I spend more time depressed than high and the epic psychotic highs don’t come more than every few years or more). So I don’t know this state as intimately as others.
Plus I have complicated mixed feelings about it all. I mean, let’s be honest, low level hypomania is nice. Even higher level has some good bits. But let’s try and be factual here.
Hypomania involves a lot of restless energy, fragmented attention, and an inability to sleep. If I wake up at 6 am and need to walk in circles around the living room talking to myself, while the TV blasts old episodes of LA Law which send me spinning off in a dozen different amazing directions, that’s a sign.
(That was the summer in Queen of Denmark Court. I had philosophical arguments with Tommy-Leo-McGarry-Lawyer at 6 am while circling. I couldn’t sit down though. Had to keep walking).
I have taken up running multiple times in my life. I’ve only ever seemed to succeed during hypomanic episodes when I’ve sometimes run until my legs gave way and then realized I was ages from home and needed to get back. I’ve done that barefoot and realized my feet were bleeding and I was lost somewhere in the Pyranees and needed to get back to the holiday house and I had no idea how. I do like to move when high. I used to sometimes decide to go traveling and fare dodge across the country.
I get angry. Stupidly angry. Angry over tiny things. I’ve screamed in Ginnie’s face and then run out of the house to sprint myself tired because she asked me to put chopping knives point down in the dishwasher. I’ve thrown a scrabble board across the room over a losing game. I’ve thrown plates at Jez’s head because they were dirty and I was having washing up rage. Well, plates at the wall near Jez’s head. Either way, it’s really not OK and I know it’s not OK.
There is a terrifying violence in me during these times. This is actually why I started self-harming – I trained myself to always take the violence out on me, not on anyone else. Then I trained myself to try and autopilot for keys or something to smash into my arm and not a knife as the knife cuts tend to be too deep.
Keys just scratch and bruise mostly.
I get weird obsessions and vanish into them for days, I’m told. They always seem very rational and logical to me. But Jez says I’m a nightmare – he can’t touch me unless he’s willing to engage with whatever I’ve decided will hold my attention. Then I ditch it, just as suddenly. I think the hypersexuality comes from this, actually. I’ve never been the kind of person who has mad one night stands with loads of people. Rather, I tend to suddenly find someone totally random completely entrancing and the best thing ever. Sometimes for really weird reasons. Something that came up a couple of times when I was a student was this complete conviction I had that I could see this mystic pattern of life and narrative and story. Like…there was a pattern underlying reality and that pattern created romance and true love and fairy stories. But because I could see if, I had a weird compulsion to engage with the pattern if I saw a slot I could step into. Like…if someone was flirting with me, I could see them taking the first steps in The Dance (capital letters) which was a part of the pattern and I had to play my part and take the matching steps.
Which meant completely reinventing myself to be the True Love of whoever was Dancing with me, and being totally in love with them in return. I called it ‘touching the fairytale’ and it felt like a compulsion. It didn’t matter if I was in a monogamous relationship with someone else. I had to follow The Dance.
This then, very awkwardly, would come to an end as the episode would crash into depression, and I’d wake up one morning, feeling like shit, and suddenly painfully aware that I’d trashed my life, messed up a relationship and had sex with someone I DID NOT EVEN FANCY. The last bit, by the way, feels truly horrific. Almost like I’d been sexually assaulted, except I’d enthusiastically consented at the time. I felt violated by my own mad self. I don’t know if that is deeply insulting to victims of assault, but I have been one of those two and the two felt very similar, but with added self-recrimination when it was the madness to blame.
Sometimes, of course, the weird ideas are nice. My last odd episode was at the start of 2018 when I started seeing this weird god figure I called ‘the Hunter’ who was probably a bit like Herne the Hunter and I thought was there to watch over me. Which wouldn’t be the first time when I was having those episodes. That felt pretty comforting, especially as everything else was shit then, and I rather miss him.
The difference between mania, and hypomania, I’m told, is that if you know that what you’re experiencing probably isn’t real, it’s hypomania. I’m just going to say that I am unconvinced it’s a clear division. One of my nastiest episodes involved my swinging back and forth, multiple times in a day, as to whether the spirit living inside my chest trying to get me to carve myself open was real or not. I could sit in a meeting with a CPN and agree he was definitely not real but then walk into the toilet, and stare at myself in the mirror and all I could see was him.
But that was “just hypomania”. In which case it’s bloody hard work.
This sort of happens on a 1-10 scale, but I basically never stay at the extreme ends for long periods. I escalate past 1 and up to about 4-6 very quickly and I peak above 6 for a couple of days really. I’ve never hallucinated for more than three weeks. It’s all short intense bursts of crazy. But quite memorable.
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Mixed states. This is either dysphoric mania or agitated depression. Psychiatrists tell me different things. I’m not sure it matters. Imagine taking hypomania/mania and depression and squishing them together so you feel horrific and hate yourself and are getting psychic messages telling you to jump off the Clyde Bridge to purge the world and the only reason you aren’t is that the sodding Clyde Bridge doesn’t bloody well exist and the psychic messages are very specific.
I mean, for example. You know. If you want to.
These episodes are my bane. I do not like them. They happen more often than nice mania which is sucky.
I feel like I may have picked the wrong version of insanity.
1-10 scale as per usual. Lasts longer than mania, not as long as depression. Routine, distraction, recognising patterns and moving away from the bad stuff and distracting myself with something physical is super effective at keeping the worst of the absolute lunacy at bay. Mostly, medication, routine, regular exercise, going outside, keeping a tidy house and eating right keeps it all in check. And sometimes it rushes in like a tsunami and I just need to deal with what I have.
Goodness, this is very long. I’ll post it anyway.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-03 08:04 pm (UTC)I don't have anything actively useful to say.
But you do have huge amounts of my sympathy.
(I've seen The Dance before, with an ex. She spent the whole night totally entranced by a guy, in a horribly embarassing way, and then the next morning couldn't believe that she'd done that, with someone she didn't even fancy. She felt mortified by it. Thankfully he'd been really nice about it and not taken advantage.)
no subject
Date: 2018-11-06 09:12 am (UTC)The good news is that my mental health is improving. It's one of the reasons I wanted to write this up, along with some sense of scale. I am sort of hoping it'll be the kind of record I can look back on in later years and think 'huh - I'd forgotten that', but if things go wrong, it might be something for me to throw at doctors or other people, especially if I can figure out a more detailed numerical scale for the crazy. But right now, I'm in the positive place of having the episodes come further and further apart, and more and more shallow every time they do come. So there is a lot of hope.
It's just been a long journey to get here.