My Strength

Mood : Stressed and Melancoly

I know I talk about my husband a lot. I know I am very fortunate to have someone who supports me. I am not a support group kind of person because I am very passionate about people not generalizing and therapy just doesn’t work for me. I tend to get over things that happened in the past. Do they affect who I am? Well probably but talking about them is not going to change the way I feel.

This morning my husband was reading this article.

Which I thought was wonderful. He tries very hard to understand everything he can about my illness.  I wish that he had an outlet but when he went to the spousal support boards he found them to be more negative then positive. I went to check it out because I thought maybe he was exaggerating because he didn’t want to use it, but it really was a bit of a downer.  It seemed every other post was about someone leaving their bipolar partner or having to deal with their infidelity.
For those people that kind of support may work, however for someone like my husband he needs a place where he can rant but not be told how much better his life would be without me.  So if anyone has any suggestions I would love to pass them on to him.  I know dealing with me is very hard on him as he is a fixer. I may have mentioned that before I think. He always wants to be able to make me feel better, when I am depressed it is really hard on him as well as me because there is really little he can do but occasionally make me laugh or smile. Which honestly is something wondrous in of itself.
I wish he could talk to me about me, but since I have such a fragile ego I don’t think it would be helpful to either of us. As it is my self esteem is pretty much non-existent no matter how many times he tells me how beautiful or smart or wonderful he finds me. Which also drives him bonkers and gets him frustrated.
Couples therapy obviously won’t work cause our relationship is strong but he already hears everything I think and feeling and I think he needs his own private time to deal with stuff.  Which honestly also scares the hell out of me. What if he sees someone who suggests he leaves me, what if he meets someone at an online support group and they fall madly in love and he leaves me.. ugh.. You see a theme here?  Ya and he even knows that I am writing that and says.. that’s your bipolar brain talking.. Which he is right he knows how it works.
So I need to think about this less selfishly and hopefully find him some kind of support..

I Want To Barf

I finally got up the courage and cut ties with my shrink. I feel like puking now, my hands are shaking my heart is racing. Hello old friend Panic Attack haven’t seen you in a while.

I wonder if I should just see one and let them diagnosis without telling what is actually wrong with me. I mean of course I would offer answers, but I feel like everyone just goes with the easiest course..

She’s Bipolar 1, She’s Bipolar NOS, she’s blah blah blah.. I don’t know I think the first doctor who got me before medication might have know a little more than this last one who saw me partially medicated without any real knowledge of what I was going through.

If someone would have asked me if I had dissociative things happening to me, I would have said no, but I clearly have a lot of leanings this well as well as the bipolar 1.. So maybe I’ll get some real help now that I understand what all these things happening to me really are.

There is nothing worse than telling a doctor you are constantly disconnected from your body and them not even acknowledging it.. Well I start the look today since I am sitting up but mostly numb mode..

What Do I Want To Be When I Grow Up

Mood: I’m outta bed that’s something

Most people my age are already well into their lives, kids, career, home.. I had dreams, I wanted to be a lawyer, I wanted to be a veterinarian, I wanted to be a song writer, I wanted to be an author. I wanted to be something.. Anything but what I am.

The fact that when I am manic, like many bipolars, I have such grand ideas. I have bought so many beads planning to make jewelry, tons of stuff to make perfume. Let’s add candle making, painting, photography and computer graphics (at least I still use PS6 ) and the start of more novels then I can remember. I’ve mostly just spent a lot of money on closet space holders. Which if you know LA Apartment is not a lot of room! Half my stuff is spreading to other rooms.

I start working out and then buy like a gazillion video tapes, I might even stick to it for a couple of weeks. I have 3 different Shaun T videos. There will be no time soon I am even going to be close to doing insanity, but well I my thought was I would get there eventually.  Must HAVE it.

Even when I start a job, I work as a phone sex operator, as it’s the only thing I can find to do with my situation. So I buy books so I can excel at it. I buy websites so I can advertise and be noticed. I buy props and software so I can be all I can be. Then I soon realize that the job makes me feel like shit.. Like complete shit..  I hate lying, I hate pretending to be something I am not and that is all that job is about. You don’t make friends, the other woman consider you competition so you talk to men all day who are married or just plain sick in the head and try not to feel like your soul is being sucked from your body.

I did vlogs for a while, but I hate the way I look so much that I was always deleting the videos and couldn’t look the camera in the eye, making them even more awkward.

I want to be a productive member of society. I want to be able to help my husband look after us. I want to be able to help buy our next home. I want to be good at something.  Living on idea’s doesn’t do anything for me or anyone else.  I have no idea what I want to do or be. I feel like I’ll be of retirement age before I even figure it out.

I couldn’t even finish public school because I got beat up by about 20 kids and it was kick them out or me.. Guess who they picked.

I’m not ignorant or anything like that. I think that I have a decent vocabulary and can write quite well when the mood takes. I am horrible at math though. So any career with math involved is pretty much out. I have so many out of body experiences that I am clumsy which puts out a lot of other careers. Plus the needing my husband to go out thing, maybe we could work somewhere together, I am sure he wouldn’t mind more hours on his already too long work week.  *sarcasm so doesn’t work well with print*

I hope that they get my meds to a point where I can be a real part of society but then that is just another thing in the long line of things to do when all I want to do live that dream that so many people take for granted.

I’m Falling Apart

Last night when I tried to go to sleep I ended up paralyzed on my back trying to scream for my husband in absolute terror.  Of course he never heard a thing because you can’t even whisper let alone scream. I don’t even know why it happened, I thought I had gotten enough sleep.

Today I had a major breakdown.  I just sobbed and sobbed trying to remember who I was. I just don’t feel like me.  I am just in that little bubble watching my mind tear itself a part trying to figure out a way to fix everything.  At this moment I feel hopeless and just want to take some sleeping meds and then sleep until I feel better.  Whenever that is going to happen.

My cycles are so radical I can never tell. I just know when I feel good I hope it lasts forever and it quickly lets me down.

Those damn men were yelling and cheering and annoying the shit out of me again today, it made me actually get up and scream shut of the fuck up out my window.. Not once but three times. I tried contacting the office here, no one answered.. I tried writing an email and that email bounced back with a I’m not here right now call the office.

Honestly the last thing I need when I am like this is sound. I hate the way people sound when they are en mass. I can barely tolerate it when I am up and even then I have to have music in the background so I can focus. I wanted to cut a bitch. Seriously though.. I just breathed and lay back down and sat there for a couple hours doing nothing, just staring off into space. Waiting for my husband to get home and save me with a little levity and contact.  I feel numb and cold and spacey.. I imagine this is very much what a porcelain doll feels, fragile and empty.

He’s gonna end up leaving me, I am such a strain on his life..

He’s on his way home and wanted to know what I wanted to eat, baby carrots.. that’s it. I have all of a sudden gotten this distaste for meat, well for most anything but meat most especially, It’s been going on for over a week now and seems to be getting worse. Which is bad cause our freezer is packed with meat thanks to his mothers need to send it for gifts for every occasion.  blech

How bad is bad? I’m afraid I don’t know. I just know that each time I go into the pit of hell, it gets darker and more painful.

 

Sleepy and Sad

SADFACEToday I woke up sad and sleepy. I don’t know that I have a trigger for my depression other than stress and I am always stressed about something. Even the smallest little things. So I spent most of my day in bed, sleeping. I was trying to block out the world.

My dogs awoke me with barking and there were some men in the courtyard outside of my apartment yelling in Spanish so I couldn’t understand a word they were saying. My patio door was wide open, we leave it that way during the day since I am always home and the dogs like to go outside and get fresh air. Sometimes when I am aware of the realness of the world if I am going to sleep I close it, usually pretty frightened. Today was completely different.

I woke up listened and said to myself if they are going to kill me, might as well just let them kill me. I’m not feeling suicidal just very tired of the ups and downs. I am looking forward to seeing my shrink on the 27th. I wish that she wasn’t always so booked that it takes a month to get into see her. But what can I do. I am not ready to find a new doctor and I am hoping that she knows me well enough to listen to what I want from my treatment.

I wonder how long the sadness will last this time, it always feels like forever… I hope this time it’s not.

Mommy Dearest

Mood: so-so

My mother and I always seemed to be on the outs. We got along better once I was a mature adult but my view of her was still skewed. I didn’t realize until very recently just how much I had put her through.

At 10 we started family counseling as my mother had no idea what to do with me, after the drugs that had been given to me everything about me had changed. Gone was the sweet happy girl, now I was moody and flippant. I was sleep walking almost nightly. My mom told me a story recently of her waking to check on me and not being able to find me anywhere and her fearing the worst as the doors to the apartment were locked. Luckily I was hidden deep in a closet sleeping, but I tried to do many different things while sleep walking including trying to crawl into a freezer.

At 12 I was out partying every night, sometimes didn’t come home for days and was extremely promiscuous. She’d ground me, I’d disappear or run to my father, who honestly was pretty damn useless. I remember one night in particular I had gone to a party and smoked some weed, apparently some asshole thought it was great to put some angel dust in it so most of the night is a blur. The only things I remember was being naked, trying to kill myself and my dad ricocheting my head off the walls of the hallway as he took me home. Of course there was another memory that I had forgotten until recently. My mom had stayed up with me all night until the effects had warn off. I thought at the time she was doing it to punish me, but honestly I was like a rabid animal. She feared for me.

At 12, I tried to kill myself intentionally for the first time. I took an entire bottle of some medication for migraines. My father didn’t believe my sister when she ran to tell him, but my mom knew it was true and made him take me to the hospital. Thanks mom! *this isn’t sarcasm*

Today her and I are on very different footing, she comes to visit me in California from Canada. In fact she is going to be coming for 6 months every year, I am very excited as I won’t be so lonely (sorry if I repeat something I have typed before). She calls me weekly to make sure I am okay and is researching my bipolarity so that she can be as understanding about it as possible. She is a remarkable woman and I am very proud to call her my mom.

I wish I had of realized it sooner we could have had even more time together!! However there is always the here and now and she is only 64, so we have lots of time. My great-grandmother lived to 102. My mom has even more spunky.

How is your relationship with your mom?

A Great Talk

Mood: Levelish.. for now I guess..

marina del rey

My mood yesterday was crazy, I started off sad, then slightly manic, then contemplative, then insecure.. One of the good things about it is I went out to the marina *see picture above*  and went out to dinner, both really hard things for me to do so they were big accomplishments. I don’t know what this had to do with the moods. I am trying to go out for at least a walk when I am feeling sad though, apparently exercise helps!

When I was sitting down to dinner with hubby we got to talking about the way I was before I got medicated. Honestly I have been talking his ear of a lot the last few weeks as I am trying to finally reach some kind of acceptance of my diagnosis so that I can just come to terms with it. For some reason those first few years are mostly a fog, but he remembers everything quite clearly, something I think I will probably never forgive myself for. I didn’t know what was wrong with me but having someone who loves you suffer in anyway never feels good.

We went over a lot of my hypersexual behavior, which honestly for him was mostly a win, I was also very involved in the personal problems of other people and while I never hid the fact of it from him, I was also may have been to forthright and he actually got concerned that I had been having an affair. I didn’t even know about this until today. It breaks my heart to have him to have ever of thought that for a second. It’s the one thing I have managed to avoid doing and will continue regardless how bad this gets, I hope.

He is my everything. Some will say this might be a bad thing. I don’t know if it is. He literally saved my life. He came to meet me in Canada for my birthday. I had planned to kill myself after meeting with him. I however had the most profound experience. He was very sick, so all we could do was talk, snuggle, nap and watch cartoons (we both love em). I had already had feelings for him, but in that time I fell in love with him. So I decided to chase him down in Nebraska and we were together ever since.

That’s not to say it has been easy, I tried to kill myself during one of my manic episodes. He hadn’t done something with the laundry and I went bat shit crazy about it then took a whole bottle of sleeping pills. After that I have no memories of it at all, but he does. I hate that. He tells me the stories of it from time to time and laughs because I drove the nurses crazy by being a general pain in the ass. He saves me time and time again.

His smile can just amaze me.

He worries that he doesn’t feel things strongly enough. He is soft spoken and kind and rarely gets angry when others would be well past their breaking point but when he loves me, he loves me more than I have ever seen ever in the entire world.. Well you get my meaning, I’ve never seen the entire world.

I can’t say how lucky I am, I can never express it enough. I just hope that I can be a better person and keep him happy, I would hate to see that smile go away.

Frikken Bipolars!

Mood: How about Meh.. with a touch of can’t sit still or find anything to do.

I was recently reading one of the many support boards and there were some suggested blogs.. It really just made me mad more than anything. We as bipolars are our best support system and our worst enemies.

A Rant

You know what I absolutely hate? When bipolars decide that their experiences pertain to everyone.

Examples:

We are unable to have relationships. (it’s hard but we can do it with an understanding supportive partner)

It’s not true that bipolars are violent. (some are/were) I tried to strangle my mother once in a fit of bipolar rage! I struck out at my husband with my fist and and severely hurtful words.

It’s not true that bipolars are promiscuous. (some are/were) this happens to be one of the reasons that many bipolar relationships end in divorce. ( as I said one)

It’s not true that we can’t be cured. (we can’t be cured just treated, there are medications and treatments that can assist people. Some people however never get the right treatment. Congratulations functioning bipolars!)

Movies don’t portray us correctly. (some movies don’t portray you correctly) A good example of this is Silver Linings Playbook. This movie cut me to the bone. I watched it with my husband and mother and father in law and couldn’t finish watching it because a great deal of it reminded me of myself. I felt ashamed and awed. However I have heard that some bipolars found it exaggerated. That’s because… wait for it… We are all different!

Admittedly a lot of movies don’t paint us in a favorable light but anything that get information out there is a good thing. It makes people curious. There will always be the ignorant few that don’t care to learn and that has nothing to do with the movie.

Sorry this is the one thing that really pissed me off today. All of our experiences are unique. We may share attributes with others but we are but one person in a sea of many and to say blatantly that your experience is the same as anyone else’s is well just selfish and thoughtless.

I cannot believe how fired up this got me. I try to read others messages/blogs with an open mind and when I speak I tell it from what has happened to me because I know it varies from person to person.

If someone has all the knowledge, they may know what to expect but when someone singles out certain behavior and refutes others it will alienate the very people who are reading what we write as a support system. No one wants to feel alone. No one is alone. What you are feeling others have felt. Others have also felt what you have not felt.

We as bipolars must stick together as a community because no one will ever understand us quite like one another.

As a little side note, thank you to the people who have commented and followed my blog. I appreciate it very much. I am horrible at responding to comments it makes me feel shy and I come up a blank most of the time but please know that it means a great deal to me.

My Brain She Is Broken

Mood: Tired with a touch of sadness.

Last night I could not sleep. This happens quite frequently so if I make a lot of spelling errors I apologize.

The other night I said to my husband. Do you think I am mentally ill enough, I haven’t tried to kill myself in a while. This was a concern about talking to my shrink about ECT.

It’s not that I haven’t thought about it, I mean when I am depressed all I can think about is how tired I am of all this. However because I don’t have the extreme Mania that I did before it’s something I actually think about as opposed to just *bam* doing it.  It scares me to think my mania is low when I spent 15000 dollars on crap in a 2 month period. I can’t even imagine what that would be like unmedicated!!

Back on topic. Last night I was feeling so off, kind of like watching myself from the outside. It’s so hard to describe. I hate when this happens as I am hyper aware of everything around me, tiny sounds, light, how every single part of my body feels. I was cutting boxes open with a knife and thought I bet stabbing myself in the leg would bring me back to being myself. I thought about it for probably 30 mins, then calmly put the knife down and walked away. Had I been unmedicated I would have likely just done it.

This I didn’t tell hubby about, I try to be completely honest with him about how I am feeling, but tend to hide instances where I think about hurting myself. I know I should share this, but I don’t want to have to go to the hospital. I’ve managed to avoid it so far over the years except for a couple of suicide attempts and would like to keep it that way. I need to be with my Boo, it keeps me grounded for the most part.

Damn I am tired.

Dammit Why Today

Mood – crappy with a  side of WTF

Last night I had horrible dreams of people trying to murder me. My husband accidently shooting a baby that was ours. Seriously ridiculous stuff since we have dogs (I do have a grown daughter). We decided kids would be a bad idea, I’m not stable and he doesn’t know how to say no. Really wouldn’t work.

I kept going back to sleep trying to fix my dreams. Not sure if any of you are able to return to the dreams you had and rewrite them but I do this quite a lot. Can I repeat happy dreams, nope not yet. Maybe one day. I don’t really have all that many anyhow so hard to practice

Anyhow the point is I woke up paranoid which is usually one of the ways my depression starts. It always centers around my husband and the fact that he might be having an affair. Now this man spends most of his time home, he works late maybe 4 times a year and is almost always immediately available should I need him. I have no ‘real’ reason to even remotely think anything like that.. However it pops in my head, I mean if I was him I would want some thin beautiful young woman. Why would he want to always be with this fat, ugly irrational woman when he can get himself some sweet thing on the side.

BTW I also think my husband is handsome enough to get any girl he wants.. Also not a reality, but it must be good for his ego.

Why does it have to start on Valentines Day, a day I already pretty much detest because my romantic side is way more creative then my husbands.. Thank you 20 years of romance novels! I think I am going to start boycotting all holidays which could possibly turn out disappointing. Christmas, V-day, Birthdays, hells ya! Lets just thrown em in the ocean and let them learn how to swim.

God I feel sad and tired….. I hate it..

What’s even worse is I posted on twitter to some cute things and actually was sad when in minutes no one responded.. Funtastical.. ugh

Might go back to bed even murderers are more fun than this..

 

EDIT: could this be one of those triggers I have been told to start looking for? V-Day = Bad Day?