This is the first blog for those reading on my blogger site regarding my mental illnesses. Over the coming weeks I will add more to this, I will probably publish some of my older posts from www.malensteptoe.com as well
It’s been a while since I last wrote about anything to do with my personal experiences with mental illness. Mainly I haven’t written anything or I have been writing about other stuff. I don’t know why I haven’t been writing about my own experiences that much, I suppose for a bit I was feeling quite a bit more down than I had been, I had been unwell recently and over the last few weeks I have felt more driven to write about other topics, which I have felt more pressing to write about. But none the less, I have finally got around to writing about what’s been going on since May 6th when I wrote a blog I titled – My Brain is a bastard and I hope I slip and it falls out through my nose.
It’s been a while since I last wrote about anything to do with my personal experiences with mental illness. Mainly I haven’t written anything or I have been writing about other stuff. I don’t know why I haven’t been writing about my own experiences that much, I suppose for a bit I was feeling quite a bit more down than I had been, I had been unwell recently and over the last few weeks I have felt more driven to write about other topics, which I have felt more pressing to write about. But none the less, I have finally got around to writing about what’s been going on since May 6th when I wrote a blog I titled – My Brain is a bastard and I hope I slip and it falls out through my nose.
Things have been pretty up and down since I wrote that
blog. I have seen some of my lowest lows and some of my highest highs. On that
note, for a long time I have had a diagnosis of Depression, likely having
suffered from it since I was quite a young age. However, just a few weeks ago
this diagnosis was withdrawn and I now have a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder.
Bipolar Disorder isn’t something I completely understand,
though I have a better understanding of it since I was diagnosed as I have
spent a fair amount of time researching it. Bipolar Disorder shares some
similarities with Depression as Depression is an aspect of Bipolar Disorder. Unlike
with Depression where a person suffers the symptoms of Depression and
eventually returns to period of typical mood without the symptoms of
Depression, a person with Bipolar Disorder there is a third aspect to the
illness which is mania or hyper-mania depending on the severity. This is where
I find I get a little lost because there are aspects of hyper-mania which can
be symptoms of Depression. In my experiences part of my hyper-mania is
insomnia, which can occur in Depression, the difference seems to be the mood
and activities during this time. During my periods of insomnia I may get an
hour or 2 of sleep every off day or so, the rest of the time I am active, wide
awake, it is as if I have had a full night’s sleep. Where in actual fact I
might have been awake for 24-30 hours before I got 2 hours sleep, then repeat
and this can continue to repeat for a week, 10 days or more. 30 hours seems to
be the maximum length of time for me to be awake without any sleep, however I
had my first experience doing so recently.
About 10 days ago I was coming to the conclusion of a 67
hour period without any sleep. Now, this is seriously not something I recommend
anyone try to do on purpose. If I could have I would have gone to sleep quite happily
however it was not to be. After about 35 hours I started to feel quite sick and
this feeling continued to get worse over the following hours. After about 65
hours of being awake the skin on my face started to feel like it was slipping
off. During the time I was awake I was completely alert, coherent and active. I
went to work and did my normal shift, having been awake for about 40 hours at
the time. I was as productive as any other day I worked, I didn’t feel tired as
in I was going to fall asleep, however I was extremely frustrated because I couldn’t
sleep and I knew that I needed to, despite not really being tired. In the end I
saw a doctor at the local clinic who told me to take a double dose of my Oxazepam.
For those unaware of what Oxazepam is it belongs to a group of drugs called benzodiazepines,
used for short term treatment of Anxiety and Depression and to assist in sleep.
I had already tried taking 30mg of this the night before and it had no effect.
Taking 60mg however did help and I ended up getting about 6 hours of day that
night. From there I fell back into my standard insomnia routine of 24-30 hours
awake and a few hours of sleep. This lasted for about another 4 or 5 days. Then
I slept all bar a few hours a day for a couple of days. Now I am just hoping to
get back into a normal sleep routine for a while.
Other than sleep being an issue for me, both in
depressive stages and also in mania/hyper-mania stages, during mania/hyper-mania
I get incredibly irritable and easily frustrated, I have thoughts, so many
thoughts, constant thoughts of absolute nothingness, sometimes I am barely able
to start one thought before I am on to another and they just don’t fucking
stop. It is like a constant cyclone of thoughts. Actually that kinda works
well, think about the cyclone picking up house and as it does tearing pieces of
it. Now that’s gone on for a bit there is pieces, some large, some, going a
couple hundred kilometres an hour, round and round. Each one of those bits of
the house is part of a thought. As briefly as you see a piece of the house is
like the length of time you actually hold on to the thought and then there is
the next one, the next and so on and so forth. It is fucking horrible,
frustrating and exhausting, yet at the same time there is an element of exhilaration
as the thoughts fly by there is this overwhelming sense of possibility, of this
urgency to do it all and to do it all right fucking now. It is an extremely
difficult pattern of thought, or lack of a pattern, to grasp. Sometimes I
remember enough of a thought that had some validity to it, that afterwards once
I had calmed down, I will think about it some more, think it through and it
might be an idea for something to write about, a book or some invention or new
way of doing or thinking about something. It’s odd, writing that last sentence
I realised that I am not thinking of absolute nothingness, it is just that the
thoughts are so incomplete, so random, so fractured that I can’t make sense of
them and when I say random, think channel surfing with thousands of channels,
all showing something completely different, history, modern, animals, robots,
scientific, children’s entertainment, you name it my mind has thrown at least
half a thought at me about it.
So that is pretty much what has been happening of late. While
I am sleeping better at the moment, I would probably say that I am still
somewhat hype-manic in that I am doing a lot more than normal, my mind is still
racing with thoughts and I am finding them hard to nail down and my mood is
much more heightened than normal. As my psychiatrist suggested though, while I
am in this state “enjoy it”. As I don’t really go too far into mania where I do
things which are risky or dangerous etc. when I am able to have some ability to
focus my thoughts I do get lots done and I enjoy it. In particular I enjoy the
amount of writing I get done, normally I would also get a lot of cleaning done
but my ankle has been rather sore for the last week, even more so the last day
or 2, as I found out a few hours ago this is because I had sprained my ankle,
had done nothing about it for a week and today it was quite swollen. So, I am
trying very much to behave myself and not going doing heaps of cleaning etc.
Though, just thinking about it, maybe the reason I didn’t feel the pain as much
and didn’t do anything about it is because of this hyper-mania, either that or
its cause I’m a twit…yeah lets go with that.
Cheers for reading, please comment. I want some comments.
