Pills

I just spent an hour organizing my pills. It’s quite a production. I’d had everything in a shoe box, and somehow all the bottles spilled into a total mess.  Now everything is in its place, and I have six weeks where I don’t have to do anything but open a little plastic box and pop away. Every time I do this, I think–where will I be four, five, six weeks from now?

Here’s a rundown of the recently reduced cocktail: Depakote (500mg), Seroquel (25mg-75mg); Topomax(100mg); Wellbutrin (150mg); Lunesta (1mg–sometimes); Xanax (can’t remember the mg … sometimes).

 

Climbing out of my head

I feel so alone. There is no one who can understand this feeling that has come over me, this feeling that the mania is returning, the sudden realization that the crying I did at work today was maybe not that I have a terrible boss (even if my boss leaves much to be desired), but that I am not in complete control.

Photo/NYTimes

I saw Wishful Drinking, the one woman show with Carrie Fischer tonight. I’m so happy I saw it, but what’s funny–or funny is not really the word but I don’t have the right word at this moment– is that I think I was compelled to purchase the tickets to a show that deals with manic depression because I am feeling so bipolar today, these days.

The show was fantastic.  Fischer’s description of mania gave me chills. In her book she writes, “Mania is, in effect, liquid confidence… when the tide comes in, it’s all good. When the tide goes out, the mood that cannot and should not be named comes into you. Because to name it would be an act of summoning.”

Afterwards, it was as if the play, for me,  had summoned even more feelings of mania, had put all of it in the front of my head. My thoughts were racing. (My thoughts are racing.) And I stood on the subway platform, waiting for the always-slow C train, thinking about the fact that maybe the problem at work today wasn’t me. It was just bipolar me, overreacting and crying and screwing everything up.  But my boss did do something that I think was inappropriate. It seems, however, that these uproarious events only happen when I’m manic, like it’s a bad coincidence.

On the platform, wrote this on a blank page of my planner: “I can’t get out of my own head. I try to crawl up out from whatever mood has taken hold to see the world as it really is, not tinted by the greys of my depressions or the purples, reds, yellows of my mania. It makes me feel like a narcissist, drowning in details, being unable to see out into what’s really important. But it’s not that I’m in love with my own image like Narcissus staring into a pool of water. It’s that I never know where my image is, exactly. So instead of looking out into the world, I’m chasing after my own face.”

I don’t know if that makes sense. But it’s the only way I know how to describe it. The earthquake   hit Haiti earlier today, I’m seeing in the headlines. But I don’t have any perspective. I am too much in my own head to recognize that my life is a fraction of a speck of a pillar of  sand on this earth, that so much is bigger and more important that my daily minutiae.

 

Still in bed

I don’t feel sad or happy this morning. I just feel empty. Took all my pills last night. Well, I almost always take all my pills, but, there’s the dance I do with taking and then not taking the Seroquel that had me so wired and excited yesterday, until it got to be night. I couldn’t fall asleep until I took a Lunesta, and had I skipped the Seroquel, I wouldn’t have slept through the night.

Mornings are the hardest time for me. I wish I were one of those people who could just wake up without hitting the snooze button four hundred times. One of those people who always gets to work on time, who cooks herself breakfast.

I’m at a point in my life where I’m 30-years-old, but I don’t know what I want out of life, really. So often my goal has to be so simple: get out of bed. It’s hard to keep track of the larger trajectory of my life when I’m riding on these mood swings. But I don’t want to take any more Depakote. I refuse to gain that weight again.

And so I’m stuck, feeling nothing. Not sure what I want. For now, I am going to get out of bed and go to work.

 

This is what mania looks like…

In the mirror, I see my face differently. All of my flaws vanish and tonight, I am beautiful. I walk around my apartment, colors and patterns popping out more vividly than ever. At work, I speed through every task, but when I receive an e-mail that’s inappropriate, instead of letting it go, I crave confrontation, a reckoning, drama.

I have sex with people I barely know, and I like it.

I talk to myself in the mirror, say the things I want to say to the jerk who wrote me that e-mail.

My head feels swollen, tired. But something is buzzing. Something that keeps me awake. Keeps me thinking about everything.  I have big plans. I am going to finish this novel. I am going to apply for a new job. I am going to get a boyfriend. A great boyfriend. All of these things seem, suddenly, possible.

My medication. As I get undressed, I convince myself to skip the Seroquel like I did last night, since that skipping plus caffeine I drank today led me to this place, I know. I look down, pick up the pills to swallow them, and at the last minute, gulp the Seroquel down with everything else.

Now the Seroquel is shutting my brain off. I can feel it working. My eyes are crossing even though I’m wired. I’m not going to be able to resist sleep, though I want to stay up.

Do I really need to drug myself to stay alive? I can’t help but feel this way, resent the fact that I couldn’t just stay up and keep buzzing like any other normal person with good ideas after midnight.

 

Sad Sleep

I slept for at least 10 hours last night.  Woke up this morning, read the New York Times. As usual, I had nothing in the refrigerator to eat, and I wanted to get food somewhere, but I felt too hungry to shower and get dressed.  I also felt this general weekend depression set it–when I have no structure, I just feel terrible.

I wish I was one of these people who just goes to the gym on a Saturday, but I don’t. Finally, I got in the shower, and then while I was showering, I decided I needed to put on this Kerastase hair mask. So then I got out of the shower, flipped through some cookbooks because I decided that after the conditioner was rinsed out, I would make my way to the supermarket to get food for the week. I would first stop in a coffee shop and get some writing done, drop some old clothes off at the thrift store.

But none of that happened.  I felt lonely. I felt aimless. With my wet, slimy hair wrapped in a towel, I curled up in my bed with a chick lit novel.  A few minutes later, I was asleep. I slept most of the day. I hate myself for being this way. For being the kind of person who sleeps my way through life.

When I take less medication and start getting manic, I don’t sleep as much.   But within a few days, I’m f’ing nuts. Now it’s after 1 a.m., I just got back from the movies and I’m up, analyzing my match.com profile, wondering why no decent men ever seem interested in me instead of doing what I should be doing: sleeping.

 

Living in Color

More of us bipolar folks need to speak out because when you hear about a bipolar person in the news, they’re doing something insane.

So many people think we’re just raving lunatics. In my writer’s group the other night, I was workshopping my novel, which is based on my own life. One of the guys in the group said: “It’s such a bummer that she has to be bipolar.” Well, yeah, I guess it is a bummer. So often I think I just want this all to go away. I want to stop thinking about the medication. I want to stop thinking that I’ve just said or done something crazy.

But then, there are other days, like today, when I think: this is part of who I am. And maybe I was put on this planet to speak out. To give other people who are just experiencing these frightening symptoms hope that they can live a “normal” existence. No matter how crazy you get, you can always turn back from that black hole of madness and find peace.  Medication has saved me, but I don’t take so many meds that I feel drugged. At this point I have realized that the dance of controlling my mood swings–the hypomania, the depressions, the pills, the therapy–that’s who I am.

I mean, if I could magically make it all disappear and still feel filled with life and energy, I’d do it. But if making the symptoms totally disappear means sucking some of the color out of my life, well, then, I’d rather have the ups and downs and live in a more colorful world.

 

Skipping Seroquel

Tonight I’m not taking my Seroquel. My doctor knows that some nights I don’t take it. I take a very low dosage that ranges from 25 mg from 100 mg if I really need to knock myself out of a hypomanic episode. I really need to be able to get out of bed tomorrow morning by 7:45 a.m., and the 25 mg makes me groggy.

Earlier, I had my writing group. I workshopped a scene where I talked about Seroquel and hypersexuality. People were shocked because they knew nothing of mania. One woman in my group started talking about the work as if she really knew where I was coming from because she has gone through depressions. While this is true to a certain extent, depression and bipolar disorder are not the same thing.

She also added that she got through her depression “without medication.”  This kind of comment drives me crazy. What people don’t understand about Bipolar (Bipolar I especially) is that you can’t just get through it without meds. At least 99 percent of people cant.  Yes, I can skip my Seroquel tonight, but I’ve taken Depakote along with a cocktail of other drugs for 10 years, and that’s how I’ve kept myself out of the  hospital.

Medication is not a choice for me.

No one would tell a diabetic: “stop taking insulin.”

People don’t get it.

 

Was it all just hypomania?

Here’s the problem with this disease.  (Is it even a disease?? Sometimes I don’t know what to call it.) Anyhow, the problem is that you’re constantly second guessing yourself. You never know if your emotions are “you” or a symptom of your mood.  For that reason, you never really know who the f you are.

I went to therapy this morning. I talked about H, about these past few months, about how horrible they’ve been. “I was kind of depressed,” I told my doctor. She disagreed. She thought I was agitated. Obsessed. She thought I seemed hypomanic. I know that she wants me to increase the Depakote. She didn’t say it, but I could tell.

A short history of me and this drug:
I’ve been married to Depakote for 10 years. When I first took it, I think they had me on something like 1500 mg.  I gained close to 30 pounds. I developed a tremor so terrible I couldn’t eat soup or hold a cup of coffee.  Eventually, I tapered the Depakote down to 500 mg, and I’ve taken that with a cocktail of other medications for many years.  But, back in July, after a blood test  showed that the 500 mg of Depakote was “subtherapeutic,” I increased my dosage to 750 mg. In less than a month, I gained 15 pounds.  My  doctor tried to claim that maybe I was gaining weight because I was just “getting older.” This was the most ridiculous thing she’s ever said to me.

I mean, yes, I’m thin, and so I think it’s annoying to other women when I complain  about my weight because when I gain 10 or 15 pounds, I only go up to a size 4 or a size 6.  But everyone should be sympathetic to the fact that it sucks to suddenly not fit into your clothes because of a medication.  Unfortunately, it’s a side effect I can’t really handle. So after going up to 125 pounds, I went back to the 500 mg.  And the obsession with H happened at that same time. Now, the subtext of the therapy today–I think–was that had been more medicated, maybe I would have had things under control.

But really? Could this possibly be true? Could these past three months have just been me hopped up on hypomania? Would I have been a little bit heavier but a lot saner if I’d just stayed on the 750 mg?  I have to say that I feel duller, less creative, not as exciting when I’m on the 750 mg. I don’t feel as much in general.  And I think that I was obsessive about H because he never called me back, because he didn’t pay attention to me.  More Depakote wouldn’t have made him call me back! More Depakote wouldn’t have changed the fact that it just sucks when a guy ignores you.

Still, I’m second guessing everything. I wish I had a stronger sense of self.  I wish I could say, definitively, this is me, not the mania. Not the disease. But I can’t.

 

Thirty

I feel old, at thirty. I feel as if when I was first working at P, there was this power I gained every time someone made the mistake of thinking I was one of my students, of thinking I was still in high school. There was power in being twenty-two, in having that stretch of possibility that was my twenties extending out in front of me.

Now I’m looking back on this decade and I don’t know what happened. It’s been four years since M and I broke up. Four years and I’m still doing the online dating thing, still going to sleep by myself, still sleeping with idiots who I don’t care about, who don’t care about me.  I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, and I’m also too hard on myself to recognize anything that I might be doing right.

Meanwhile, my relationship with H finally ended just before the new year after I finally accepted that he just, to use the cliched phrase, was not that into me. I’d spent months and months waiting for his phone calls, for his texts, for his e-mails. There would be small bursts of communication from him and then nothing, and I was totally consumed by him. I couldn’t see my way out of it. Couldn’t see that I was miserable, that he had done nothing to make me happy. Of course, I know that I need to look to myself to find happiness, not to someone else.

Still, there is this hope, deep within me, that I will be able to find someone.

Last night, I sent this guy an e-mail who looks kind of lame, but I thought, at least he’ll e-mail me back and then we can go on a date and it will be something to do this weekend.  I awoke to an empty inbox. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, and I also don’t know why I’m so craving the attention, why I can’t be happy on my own.  I feel as if not having someone else to go to sleep with means I’m not anchored, means I’m adrift.

I also hate that I still miss M. That I was thinking about him last night, wishing he was beside me. It’s so cliché. It’s so predictable. I’ve missed him for four years. He will never want me back.

 

When do you tell someone you’re bipolar?

I haven’t posted lately, probably because I’ve been consumed by a new relationship. Well, I don’t want to ‘jinx’ it by calling it a relationship, but let’s just say I’m dating someone that I really like. Usually I keep all my medication in my night table drawer. Usually, I keep at least a dozen pill bottles around and when I need to, I sit on my bed with some television program in the background to entertain me while I put 5-6 pills in each daily compartment of the plastic cases I use to keep things organized. So my drawer is a mess of orange pill bottles and three plastic old-lady pill cases.

Since the new guy started coming over to my place, I’ve put the pill boxes and the pill bottles in a shoe box. The shoe box is in the bottom drawer of my bureau.  Put simply, I’m hiding the pills just like I’m hiding the bipolar disorder. (Or am I just not revealing information that I shouldn’t reveal at this point anyhow?)  It’s been about a month since we started dating. In the past, I’ve blurted out “I’m bipolar” at the beginning of knowing someone. Once, in a moment of complete and utter madness on my part a few years ago after a terrible break up, I decided to tell a guy I was bipolar on THE FIRST DATE. I’ve now realized that bipolar disorder is something that I deal with and not something that the person I’m dating should have to deal with explicitly, especially at the beginning of a relationship. Yes, it is who I am as a person, but I have things under control.

Still, at a certain point, I feel obligated to tell him. I feel like he has a right to know, but I fear judgment and I fear what I know has happened in the past. Which is that once you tell someone you’re bipolar, suddenly you’re the one who’s really troubled. The one who is judged when she’s in a bad mood. The one who, the other person feels, might be worth leaving because she’s not “stable,” even though, I would argue I’m so obsessively tuned in to maintaining my stability that I’m in fact more stable than most.