In pieces
I feel like I am disintegrating. Like my soul has split into many broken pieces and I cannot place them back together because I don’t know where many of the pieces are, and the few that I’ve found, I don’t know how to “put them back right” because I don’t know what I’m trying to re-create.
Earlier tonight I was online and saw someone whom I put on my buddy-list because this person was only recently diagnosed as bipolar and wasn’t taking the diagnosis very well. I am familiar with the initial shock and confusion and fear. Tonight I’m glad he talked a bit, because he was suicidal and had attempted suicide twice in the past couple of weeks.
As I was frantically trying to keep him talking and not give up, my fingers shook terribly as I typed. I hardly ate anything the whole day. I didn’t want to eat because I was in a severe depression slump. When I become depressed, I go against biology even as my stomach was growling at me. I thought it funny to be terribly depressed myself while trying to convince this person not to give up and that this will pass.
I asked him to look up a crisis and suicide hotline in the phonebook - and I went to look for where it might be located on a phone book so he could find it quickly. I found that the crisis line for my city was located just on the inside front cover of the phone book, under the rabies hotline. I joked that it would be really embarrassing if I dialed the wrong number and got the rabies hotline instead. I DID get a kick out of that, even though I wasn’t sure he smiled.
If I were in his position, and I had been, I probably wouldn’t have called. But at least now I know where the number is. I asked him to have that number handy, without necessarily a commitment to call it. Have it handy, just in case. This was something I learned from my husband - doing something “just in case”. That was a good thing I learned.
Disintegration is happening to my cells. I feel the spaces between the electrons and protons and neutrons of my atoms grow, to the point where I cannot tell the beginning of one atom from the end of another. Everything seemed to be a floating mess, an oily pool, a puddle of pain. Tonight I’m trying the 3-depakote-at-nighttime dosage, but I am not sure if I will let myself sleep. When disintegration happens, even the most tired body cripple against a defiant mind. Then they both collapse.
Chatting with this suicidal man gave me a close look at what my husband saw when I experienced the darkest despair from depression. Granted, I was the sick one, but it doesn’t take away the burden that loved ones endure. Chatting with this person helped I understand what my husband meant when he told me that talking with me when I was depressed was mentally taxing for him. This experience made me appreciate that mental taxation.
You cannot walk away because you care. Then you wear yourself out caring.
Weakling
Earlier today I slept more. I can not believe how exhausted I am no matter how much I slept.
I slept at 4 a.m. this morning and woke up at 6… then at 7… then at 7:30 because I just was so exhausted. Turns out the lab training is tomorrow. So I went to see Dr. M instead. Dr. M said that when I keep hearing I’m weak, I might just start acting that way in a rebellious, “fine then I’ll show you how weak I can be” mentality. I haven’t thought about that.
Perhaps I grew angry at being called weak because this is what I am. I know I am physically weak but I can accept that. I cannot accept mental weakness. Perhaps I want to clutch onto the little bit of mental strength I believe I have left. This illness has left me feeling lost and defeated but I want to believe I still hold a compass that will guide me through my journey.
I feel ashamed that I deemed myself intelligent and articulate, yet I cannot argue against suggestions of my mental weakness. I didn’t have a track record of consistency and perseverance to counter this argument. Even if I am in a doctorate program in one of the more difficult majors one may pursue, I feel my work is questionable.
I suppose if I have admitted that I am indeed physically weak, were I to lift my blinders, I will only have to also admit that my physical weakness saps my mental strength. Then I will have to admit that in some ways, I have given up control.
Every time when I admit to a flaw that I fear admitting to, a strange thing happens: my flaw takes a lesser grip on me. It’s almost as if I were exorcised, that by admitting I AM flawed, I garner more strength, the strength that I had been draining towards maintaining a facade.
I suppose life is a constant display of the paradoxical and the absurd.
It’s an amazing show.
Unsightly
Written shortly after I was misdiagnosed with Type-II Bipolar Disorder.
I wonder if this is another one of those projects I’d start but don’t finish. I’m even capitalizing correctly, I must be taking this rather seriously, ha-ha.
This Monday I went to the doctor’s, and an hour-and-a-half later, emerged from the office clutching in my hand a photocopied sheet of the diagnosis: “Bipolar Disorder-II”. Great, I grimaced. All this time, I thought I was ‘clinically depressed.’ Now I’ve got a whole different ball game to deal with, one that I’ve not dealt with past skimming a Psych-101 text book from college. And what does ‘manic’ really mean? Bipolar Disorder is the current preferred term over ‘manic depression’. I’m not manic! I’m not hyper… am I? Maybe it’s the strange and silent whirring in my brain that seems to keep going on most of the time and preventing my tired body from slumber. Maybe the strange bursts of energy that comes from nowhere, and translates into nothing particularly productive. The energy drones on and on….
The evaluating nurse told me she did a little survey a while ago on how readily people would admit they have bipolar depression and asked whether people would rather admit they have bipolar disorder or an STD. I jumped to the answer in my head.
“Why would anyone choose STD over bipolar?”
“That’s what one would think!” said the nurse.
It’s been about 3 days since I’ve found out that I have, in the psychiatrist’s words, “a touch of bipolar disorder” and I begin to understand why people would choose to feel unsightly from STD rather than unsightly from bipolar disorder… or any other mental illness for that matter.
Brains are frightening things simply because even amidst our biotechnological revolution, we still have little clue to how it works. Something happens inside the soft spongy grayish white mass and we have no idea what exactly. Unless the brain experiences gross anatomical misformations or atrophy, we would have to use complicated machinery just to get some kind of a pattern of its activity, but not exactly a roadmap to what’s happening. We naturally fear what we don’t understand, that was why the ancient people sacrifice virgins and boil potatoes (or do they boil something else? I just made up the latter part since I have no evidence of any potato boiling by any aboriginal tribes,) we are afraid of the unknown.
Mental illness belongs to dysfunction in the brain, which largely remains a mystery even to modern science. With STD… well… just check under the ’scope or take a look and there you see it. At least you can see where you are applying your salve on! Where do I find the problem in my head, and once found, a salve for it?
Maybe the fear of unknowns have less to do with our stigma towards mental illness as… fear of loss of control. When you say you have STD, people would look at you like you’re stupid, and frequently, you were indeed - for not slapping on the glove before you go to love (and love doesn’t play a role in half the cases). Unless you were fooled by the partnering dickhead who didn’t tell you they’ve rolled in contaminated hay, this is something you CAN control.
When you say you have bipolar disorder or a mental illness, people start looking at you like you’re someone to be watched out for, to avoid, to be careful around because… heck you might be… crazy.
It’s the loss of control over one’s destiny that seems more frightening to others because it might mean they also have no control over their own.