Girl Afraid

I’ve had an extremely unproductive few days. I’ve had zero energy and have felt like doing absolutely bugger all. For forty eight hours I’ve been aimlessly clicking on Wikipedia links and watching the QVC Shopping Channel. Bored presenters ad libbing for half an hour about a dish mop is not exactly intellectually taxing. Thing is, I actually think, “That looks awesome! That dish mop could cut my cleaning time by a third!” and mourn my lack of credit card.

Also been feeling fairly ill and rushing to and from the toilet. (As teen American bloggers would quip, “TMI!” Well, fuck yis, you know the most salacious details about my various breakdowns, you can withstand a bit of toilet talk). There are three books stacked on the floor and I’ve pretty much ploughed through all of them.

On the downside, a letter that plopped through my letter box this morning has forced me into the uncomfortable position of needing to really think about my future. In fits of confidence I think about going back to work, but then the stark truth of, “Who the fuck would employ me?” rears its head. I have a stream of jobs that I’ve left or been fired from due my bizarre behaviour. I also know, deep down, that I really do not want to go back to administration and that sadly for me, my future probably lies in writing. (I say sadly because there is the other stark truth, “Who the fuck would publish me?” I am not exactly elated with confidence in my abilities. But it is what I am best at. Chipmunka did want to publish this blog as a book but due to, let’s say, creative differences, I declined.) Everybody has those dreams, though, and most people end up as office temps forever, so I probably will too.

I’m not a bad worker at all- well, if you don’t count mental health problems. That’s what’s so frustrating. I am unlazy, I am passionate, I’m thorough and driven. But my work history is so fractured because of mental illness and mental illness still gets in the way.

I’m definitely not ready for work. Everybody around me agrees, from the professionals to my friends and family. I am still very far from stable, I still struggle with my moods and the more unsavoury and scary aspects of my illness. But I have such a strong work ethic that I still always feel the need to do something, anything, to be useful.

Truth is, thinking about my future really, really scares me.

This scares me, so much. When I am alone, in the quiet, this feeling, as though my stomach has been punched into my shoes, gets me. Rob very cutely fell asleep on the sofa and has now gone to bed.

I know I am lucky. I don’t have a life threatening illness or anything like that. I know I am lucky to be mostly healthy.

I guess people don’t think about what mental illness implies for the future because it’s such a “now” thing- you get diagnosed, you get stabilised, you get thrown back into the world and reality, stubbing out your fag as you go. And that’s it, really, isn’t it.

When I talk about it, say, “I’m scared”, I feel as if I am whinging, and just stop. How the hell can you be scared of something which, let’s face it, is all in your head?

So I don’t know how to talk about this without sounding as though I am whinging.

Last week at my CPN appointment, I felt very depressed, and that sadness is still clinging onto me. She tried to cheer me up by telling me how hopeful she is for me, because I have so much awareness and insight into what is happening to me. It is how I deal with it- to be analytical and thoughtful (perhaps too analytical and thoughtful) because I spent a decade ignoring it, truly believing that it was “who I was” and that is anything was wrong, it would go away.

I tried to be hopeful too, but I felt so sad that day anyway (it was Friday, when I found out my grandad was dying, and he died an hour or two after my appointment) so I didn’t really comment.

It terrifies me, has always terrified me, that manic depression isn’t curable. It’s just managable. From the off, I was told bluntly that I had a severe case of manic depression and that I would need to take medication, quite likely, for the rest of my life.

The rest of your life when you’re twenty two years old is a long time. Accepting that I actually have manic depression, accepting still that it’s not going to just magically go away, has been one of the hardest and most painful things I have ever had to do, and I still become overwhelmed by it. There are times I just want to cry my eyes out because it sometimes seems too much, I don’t want to struggle with this for the rest of my life.

But my CPN says there are good things; I haven’t had a really, really extreme episode since last October when I was psychotic and suicidal. I’ve only had constant low-level mixed episodes and depressive periods. That, at least, is an improvement on a decade’s worth of really quite severe manic and depressive episodes.

But I felt so negative anyway that I just wanted to say, “Well, so?! What do you mean only?!”

She is right that it is an improvement and I’m aware of that. I know I am better than I was. I know that I have manic depression now, and I didn’t for ten years that it was painfully obvious to everybody but me.

But thing one that scares me: what is this is the best I will get? Constant cycling between moderate depression and hypomania? What if this is my cure?

Believe me, I try to be hopeful. I try very, very hard. I know I’m not as all-out crazy as I was. And I really was. I struggle to feel grateful though, because although being less obviously crazy is good, this “low level cycling” is still very hard. I’ve explained before the nature of flux. My moods constantly cycle, less rapidly, admittedly, but I do not get sustained “normal” periods. So everything is so inconsistent- my energy, my perceptions, my confidence, my abilities, my ties with reality. I lapse in and out of depression, paranoia, exhaustion, irritability, obsessiveness, insomnia, etc, etc, etc. I have fuck all concentration, shit memory and need to be told everything about six times. I don’t know whether that’s me, medication or manic depression.

It is almost harder to not be a flag waving mental because unless you see me often, you don’t know that I’m going through it. Therefore I just can’t ask for help and people don’t offer it anyway. To a lot of people I am much better because I’m not hysterically psychotic or deeply suicidal. People are used to me that way and it was so obvious before that I wasn’t well at all.

But these middle grounds are very lonely lands. My old life has almost receded utterly. It is harder to explain that I may be quieter but I am still struggling. Especially when I realised just what I have put people through in the past ten years, and I feel very guilty indeed for it. So I no longer ask for help or openly confide in people. I try to be shallow and cheerful. It’s probably why I write so much here. It doesn’t feel like confiding, just talking aloud to myself. I feel so very guilty for what I have put people through, and continue to put people through.

These “only” episodes are still really hard. Euphoric mania has almost totally deserted me so my “only” episodes are socially isolating mixed and depressive. I have almost forgotten how to socialise and the old anxieties that mania and alcohol banished are back in full force. The paranoia of depression is nearly constant, and it is difficult. And abandonment, of not really realising where I am going, or what I am doing.

Stupidly, self-pityingly, I feel profoundly alone.

That scares me, that this is “it”. Because I know what an improvement that it is, and it makes me want to cry. Of course, I could continue to improve, could end up being normal for more than a few weeks at a time, but sometimes I feel so exhausted by this and find it hard to believe, because I have never been well for more than a heartbeat. I guess well is scary, because it’s unknown, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t want it.

What also scares me, perhaps the most, is the unpredictability of it.

I can only really go on my own experiences. Sometimes, I can tell when things are going badly. I can tell when the storm clouds are gathering.

But other times- and often- massive episodes have struck from nowhere and completely fucked up that period of life. The suddenness, the lack of control, the rapid escalation is really scary.

I know if I am a diligent little patient then maybe the massive episodes might be banished forever and I’ll be an “only”, but what if they’re not? I’m only twenty two, how many more huge fucking out of the blue episodes are coming for me when I have already had so many?

It has happened so many times before that a mood episode has just floored me and has been so totally unrelated to whatever is happening that I have been sky high during traumatic events and suicidal during happy ones. They completely rot my life. The big episodes have no cut off point, they haven’t stopped until I’ve spent months psychotic and mental or until I’ve nearly ended up dead, with no friends, money or even real memory of what actually happened, just total devastation.

It scares the fuck out of me that it will happen again. It scares me to know that I have gotten to the point where I really truly wanted to die and where nothing can reach me and that I might get to that point again. It scares me that I might lose it totally one day. So I try, try, try to be grateful for this less extreme cycling that I am going through now.

And it also scares me that I pretty much rely on medication and work quite hard to keep taking it. I know it’s on me, but if I stop somehow- and if I go back to work right now in this state, I will pretty much have to stop taking it because it makes me so exhausted in the day time- that I’ll get sick again really quickly. I’m not stupid and I do listen to Rob and others around me who realise that when I’ve fucked about with medications, my mental state has got worse with astonishing speed.

I just rebel against having to take it when anger at the necessity of being “socially acceptable” hits me- a totally misplaced anger, it’s not about that, it’s about not ending up dead, but it’s much better to blame the psychiatric profession for not accepting me as I am than blaming myself for not taking responsibility for my health.

But I do lose it occasionally and think, “Fuck this, I don’t need medication”. Bloody hell do I work to keep in mind that I need it. I need to remind myself that I go nuts quickly without it. I bear in mind that it scares other people when I don’t take it.

And in, “Just to be difficult”, it annoys me that I can’t take antidepressants because I have always felt that they are brainwrongs, not “Oh, this has happened”.

I do try to live despite this, sometimes try to get into that Mad Pride thinking of, “It’s a gift”. I try to be sensible and listen to the doctors and I try to be hopeful and useful and helpful. But god, I get so scared sometimes.

Talk about a change of tone, eh?