The Swell

The smell of tulips, they fill the flat. The hearts have opened and pour into the sitting room. Hobbes weaves in and out of mantelpiece debris and chews on a new leaf.

Tonight was a delightful disaster. We wanted to go out and were fired up with the oil of sociability, dreams of dancing to indie hits and smiling through wreaths of smoke. We left just before midnight. The first bus was soiled by a drunk girl so off we get. Another bus and we arrive as the LSE only for twenty-eight year old Rob to be IDed and refused entry. Then we have one drink in a closing pub and discuss our first Proper Kisses.

Mine was a shambles- the boy did it for a dare. He complained of my awful kissing to everybody. The second time I kissed someone, they closed their eyes and made tongue-love to my nose instead of my mouth. I was far too polite to call a halt to the proceedings.

I am quite jealous of Rob’s teenage crushes and innocent fumblings. My first real relationship was with Robert and was as far from a teenage dream as could be. He was kinky, although we never had sex. I am reliably informed he instead fucked behind my back. He was violent and volatile yet wonderfully funny and intelligent. It was very far from wide-eyed naive love and ended in devastating fashion.

All my other relationships- as they were, sadly, not teenage encounters but relationships, as anything is when one of the participants is insane and needs support- were a mess. With the exception of Karl, who was sweet and lovely, but our sweetness and loveliness was tainted by my own mental deterioration. I was never nice or untroubled. It is so difficult to maintain innocence around me.

I kind of want to be desired and loved in an adolescent way as I missed out on that completely. Rob does somewhat but I am so accepting and so returning of his love. What anodd thing for me to moan about. He sometimes gazes at me when I am scooping food I have dropped onto my blouse (legendarily clumsy, I am) with open admiration. And I watch him while he sleeps in awe that I ever met someone so beautiful.

You will always love me

It is not always the case, though.

In my discourse with other manic depressives, there seems to be a common thread of fluctuating attitudes to other halves.

I always love Rob, no matter what.

However, my manner towards him can change drastically and suddenly depending on my mood. Sometimes I am wanton and affectionate, lavishing love, easy and laughing, witty and talkative. I want to hear every detail of his thoughts and want to tell him mine. I want us to make grand plans, I tell him I want to move, soon, immediately, to the sea, to be a writer, and how we must go now. I want sex, all the time, and become quite angry when this need is not met. I can be malicious and critical. I can be irritable and argumentative. I am wildly jealous of every other couple in the world and become twitchy and annoyed at our quiet life.

Other times, I am semi-catatonic. I can barely respond to anything he says or does. I can’t meet affectionate nor eye contact, cannot conduct a conversation. Kisses are met with stiffened lips. Touches barely raise the hairs on my arms.

This is not unusual at all, but what is unusual is that I swing from one to the other.

He restrains with his love and reason from picking up the spare change and getting a train to…anywhere. I sometimes resent him for it, mostly adore him for it.

Without Rob, I know I would be dead. I would died a long time ago. He has held me together by loving me and supporting me. I don’t care for myself at all. I don’t care if I end up on the streets or out of a job or unable to feed myself. I do care that my actions can lead to him ending up on the streets and unable to feed himself. He got me into hospital when it was clear I was going to kill myself and when I have been crying, flying, raging and freezing, he has been there.

Let’s give it up for the people who support and love us, no matter what. They’re better than any medication.

Intrusive thoughts

Something I have never really mentioned here because it seems somewhat trivial are “intrusive thoughts”.

These are not really a bipolar thing, moreso an anxiety thing. They’re defined as:

Intrusive thoughts are unwelcome, involuntary thoughts, images or unpleasant ideas that may become obsessions, are upsetting or distressing, and can be difficult to manage and be free of. ^[1] Intrusive thoughts, urges, and images are of inappropriate things atinappropriate times, usually falling into three categories:inappropriate aggressive thoughts, inappropriate sexual thoughts, or blasphemous religious thoughts. ^[2] Most people experience these thoughts; when they are associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or depression, they may become paralyzing, anxiety -provoking, and persistent.

Mine as usual centre around death and dying.

For example, I am having a lovely time, in the middle of a nice kiss, and suddenly the image of all my nails growing and twisting in my grave flashes into my head.

Or I am walking down the road and the urge to throw myself in front of a car is so strong that I have to stop and calm down.

These thoughts are disturbing but not problematic unless they become persistent and obsessional. They are persistant and obsessional with me.

They are friends with racing thoughts. I have said before I find it hard to stop because if I do, the volume of my thoughts turns up unbearably.

Racing thoughts, in case I have never explained them, are defined by that super-sexy unbiased tome About.com as:

Racing thoughts are not just “thinking fast.” They are thoughts that just won’t be quiet; they can be in the background of other thoughts or take over a person’s consciousness; they can gallop around in the sufferer’s head like a carousel gone out of control.

Before knowing anything about bipolar disorder, I called this sensation”racy brain.” Thoughts and music would be zooming through my head so fast that sometimes I wanted to scream. If it was going on at bedtime ,it could take me an hour or more of concentrating on word games to get myself to sleep.

Components of racing thoughts can include music, snatches ofconversation from movies or television or books, one’s own voice or other voices repeating a phrase or sentences again and again, or even rhythms of pressure without any “sound” in the thought.

Before I knew about bipolar, I called them, “How I think”. I have never known anything else. Racing thoughts are a constant problem for me. I often find it extremely difficult to concentrate on what someone is saying to me because the stream of thoughts in my head is so fast and loud.

Intrusive thoughts are now a part of my racing thoughts. You know those “shock” sites, that have something like a little game or an innocent animation then suddenly a shitscary face screams at you? It’s like that. Blip, blip, blip, ARGGGGGGGGGH!

Disturbing thoughts of rotting and death and suicide fill my head alongside the rubbish, making my mind an almost unbearable place to be.

It is more than being morbid. It is part of my every waking moment, terror, fear and horrible thoughts that I can’t stop.

I find myself clawing at my face and legs and clothes and repeating words over and over again to make.it.stop.

It is difficult now to even read literature or watch films or comedy created by or for people who are dead. I have to switch over. That they were there, and are now not, is too much for me.

I am sorry

The thing is, I can imagine so clearly how someone might feel before they die. A life means an awful lot, it means everything. I can’t watch those Comic Relief films, or the news. One flippant report about a man shot dead will reduce me to stricken terror or tears.

When my daddy was dying, I was with him. My dad was an atheist and felt as I do about death. I held his hand and stroked his hair- so soft and downy. And his dying was undignified, hooked up to an irritating cathater which would cause him to pull his out, his penis and fluid swollen stomach on display to his daughters, this once proud man who had created us and who would wear our mum’s dressing gowns as he tiptoed to the toilet when we were asleep. I imagine his terror when he was aware, I cannot think about it, it drives me mad. That we left for half an hour and were not there when he died, it drives me mad. All his humanity, all of who he was and his dreams and hopes and loves and thoughts all gone.

Life is so important, yet here I am smoking mine away and not living it.

I imagine people in Africa dying of AIDs and hunger- in their millions- and how it is reported with such lack of heart. I can’t do much, I can donate, but I can’t physically go out there and stop anything. But the way my heart thumps and I begin to panic when I think of someone dying, I have to ignorantly turn away, blink from the glare, press it out of my mind.

I wanted to be a social worker or a psychiatric nurse. I can’t bear people suffering. I think of people being beaten and starved, terrorised and alone and I know how ungrateful and trivial I am. Their suffering gets to me so much that I find it so much easier to immerse myself in my own suffering, be selfish, think of my own woes. At least with those I can affect them, change them. I am useless to anyone at the moment. The times in the past I have tried to help have backfired. I am scared of making peoples’ lives worse rather than better. I am afraid that if I was ever in a vocation where someone depended on me that I would let them down.

Speaking of which

The CPN called yesterday. By the end of the phonecall I was so angry that I threw my phone at the monitor. My “urgent” appointment with her is scheduled for April, and no appointment has been made with the psychiatrist.

Her wonderful advice was, “Keep taking your medication”. I told her it is not working, it is really clearly not working and she said I had only been taking the antidepressant since the beginning of January.

Forgive me, but I know it should be working by now.

Until April then, nothing. I have come to expect no less.

My mood was actually alright until later today when it dropped. At the moment, I feel quite depressed and very anxious and twitchy. I am tempted to get my coat on and go for a walk to shake off some energy but it is 5am. I am still fairly rational, which is always a good thing. I read some stuff earlier about why suicide was a bad idea, just to remind myself.

I know suicide is a bad idea, as I say, life is important. I know that if I could, I would just somehow switch off the pain and confusing and maddening instability in me. It is not just that, however. It is not only my moods which are cyclical, it is jobs, it is sociability, it is everything. At the moment and for some time I have felt that I am not going to achieve anything as I can never be stable nor “good” manic long enough to make it happen. The idea of spending many years like this terrifies me. And that after all the struggle, I will have achieved nothing.

Guilt

I feel guilty all the time for what I put people through and of how little I achieve.

What I don’t want, though, is for anyone to ever feel guilty about me. If I could, I would bundle everyone up in my arms and tell him that it really isn’t their fault and I mean that.

My family and some friends have expressed guilt over “not knowing how bad it had got” which they shouldn’t. I didn’t know how bad it had got either and besides, people have things going on in their lives and it shouldn’t be anyone’s job to watch the small bizarre one. Especially in my family, when they already have so much to cope with. These are my problems, not theirs.

My ups and downs and breakdowns and meltdowns have very little to do with anyone else. I don’t mean that people are incapable of making me happy, they are. They can also made me sad. But my true “manic depressive” type mood swings are utterly uninformed by actual circumstances. They are without warning and seemingly untriggered.

So, if I never write any great literature, know that no-one is responsible for it other than myself.

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day

Saint Patrick’s Day has been and gone. I don’t celebrate it as I’m not religious, nor am I an English imbecile in a stupid hate.

It’s one of those holidays that makes me miss my family. It was tradition to go to the local Derby House pub with my dad as he drank pints and we drank flat cokes. They had “amusements”- a battered old DJ spinning “Dead or Alive” over a crackling PA and a roundabout from a park pushed maniacally by a gypsy with a spent cigarette dangling from their mouth.

Today, as usual, I didn’t join in the raccous forced festivity. But on the way back from an errand, I did stop off in the pub for some Irish stew and felt rather lonely, so imagined my dad sitting opposite me, craning his neck to see the football.

Happy Mother’s Day

To the mothers out there. I got a box of chocolates from “Hobbes”.