So many things have been going on in my life… and much that I just cannot talk about anywhere but in my journals. God is making things happen around my friends and I. I don’t know where this is going, but I’m managing to stay sane throughout all these things.
If this were to happen to me a few years ago, I’d probably be in the hospital by now. I’m now strong enough that I can not only just stay sane but incredible things are happening in the process. I can be there for important people in my life and they are there for me.
Sometimes, I wonder if I’m in a psychotic episode.
Only this is not psychotic… this is God working in real life. Through extraordinary circumstances, 2 of my closest friends met from thousands of miles away for 5 days and fell in love and now he’s moving here with me to find a place in my hometown!
In high school, I was really good looking and I could have almost any girl I wanted. However, I trusted God with everything back then. Then, my first psychotic episode happened along with a Bipolar I/schizoaffective disorder diagnosis. I started taking meds. I assure you, the trauma, the stress, and the meds all together caused me to gain a lot of weight. As a result, I’m fat now.
I don’t call them battle scars, but wounds that can heal. It’s been top 5 in my worst struggles in life I’ve ever had, that is, being fat. I remember how good it felt to feel good about my body and have all the energy and health and ability to do the things I want to do. Now that I’ve managed the trauma, the stress, and the meds, I sense a reckoning at hand soon!!! 🙂
If it’s worth anything, after going through those vivid psychotic experiences I went through, I found the other side is a wonderful place and it’s intricately connected to everything here, now.
It’s not a matter of who ends up there or who doesn’t… it just is. We’re all part of it, whether we know it or not.
One way I can describe such a perspective is waking up in a dream and having that become reality, being awake and asleep at the same time… becoming the living dead. The dream itself is nearly incomprehensible.
The living dead’s eyes are open and see what God allows them to see, never more than what we can handle.
Twelve years ago, I was newly diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, reminiscent of bipolar I. I’m now spending a little bit of time reflecting on what that was like at the time.
I remember that every detail had a purpose and God was in control of every aspect of every detail. Every detail, big and small, came from God and I denied myself in the process. It seemed like the Christian thing to do, to deny oneself and give the reigns to God to control.
This added fuel to the raging fires of bipolar problems I was going through at the time. My mood was varying between mania, hypomania, depression, and mixed, sometimes cycling multiple times a minute. One second I feel like things are looking up and God is in control and everything is going to be ok until it hits me and I get a sinking feeling that I will amount to nothing and the pain comes, which is darker than hades itself and all I want to do is kill myself and make it stop.
On top of that, I was extremely confused about who I was. I had no clue, other than that I was successful and intelligent at one point and I felt I was no more. I had lost everything and it wasn’t coming back ever again. I didn’t even like how I looked even though I was a very handsome young man.
My psychotic break was the cherry on top of this whole situation. My mind went places no one could understand. It left me completely and utterly alone, cut off from God. If I were to start thinking about religion or God or start praying, my delusions came back and my mood would skyrocket on the spot. Prayer was of no help. The Bible only fed my delusions.
I was lost in every true sense of the word.
Now, to give you an idea of how lost I was, bring all of the above to the forefront of your mind and don’t stray your attention away from it. All of it happens at once in varying degrees. This was my world, then. It was all I could know and experience for months if not years. Demons followed me and coerced me, God was there and all powerful but controlling and deliberate, yet oh so distant from my mind, heart, and soul to the touch.
I’ll try to put it all together:
I have no idea who I am other than that I’m a loyal follower of God that holds everything in his hands and nothing happens without his say so, but when I try to pray or talk to Him, my heart races and I get an adrenaline rush then my mind starts racing and I have to stop only to keep my head from going up Satan’s ass so to speak, who is also trying to convince me that I’m the second Christ or the antichrist (it sounds silly but all I have to do is say the words and I become more powerful than I can imagine) and he’s using his will power to coerce me into believing one of the two (or both), that is I’m the second Christ or the antichrist, and while all these things are on my mind, my mood is skyrocketing and plummeting by the split minute so God feels so close then so far away the next instant then my mind races again about how I’m such a failure and can’t go anywhere in life and I should just shoot myself now or slice my wrists, but my therapist reminded me that I’m a person who has people in my life who would miss me if I were to die, but it won’t stop and it needs to stop!
It hurt. This was only the surface.
My heart goes out to everyone who has just come out of a psychotic episode. You’re not alone in this experience, no matter how mysterious it was.
I went through some bouts of bad depression late last summer and into the fall. There were times I had to convince myself to stay alive. I never felt like I was losing control over my will to do so but it was incredibly painful nonetheless. What ultimately brought me out of the depression was work.
I first started helping my grandparents with things that needed to get done before their move into a retirement home. In October, I started working for two companies part time. These two jobs have helped pull me out of the depression completely.
Work gives me a schedule, a sense of accomplishment, new friends, accountability, and money to sustain myself. It took me almost a year to find work. My heart goes out to those who are looking for employment. It’s very rough not having a job, in many more ways than just money.
Now, I am doing very well. Yesterday, my therapist said she had no concerns. I hope to start writing more here as I do in my journals as well. Thank you for coming back and visiting!! 🙂
The part I will end on is God. People who believe God exists ask him, “where are you?” I no longer ask this question because if God indeed is and exists, then God is always here. I do not rely on God for my strength. I rely on my own. I rely on the support of others. God is not a crutch. To me, God is more of a necessary idea for how the world must work. With no God, there is no beginning, end, or structure. Only absolute chaos, disorder, no existence.
So if God ultimately made me, and I’m not programmed to undoubtedly believe in God, then I have been given the reigns to live freely. The possibilities are not endless, for my paths intersect with the world and other sentient human beings. I can’t always do what I want, but I can head in that direction, whether it be for good, evil, love, or hate. Those elements will spice the dish of life to be either appetizing or awful: goodness and love vs. evil and hate.
I feel like I have a lot to write about today. Not sure why but all of it is bogging me down quite a bit. I’m growing restless, impatient, frustrated, anxious, and uneasy. I no longer feel steady like I did yesterday.
I feel restless because I have a lot of inner energy radiating out that burns. The kind of burns that wound and become infected, not the burns that cauterize and sterilize. The toxic energy keeps spreading within me.
I’m impatient, because like any person who was once a child, I want everything I want NOW. I want to skip past all the hard work and navigating the path through dense jungle, and just be there now. Life isn’t supposed to be this hard. Am I really asking too much after the past I’ve endured and the endless recovery from it?
I’m frustrated because things happen not the way they I feel should have. I’m frustrated for many other reasons. I’m pretty much alone without my family and online friends. I have no job. I have no life. I’m out of shape. I’m too lazy to do much about it. I have great ambitions with no clear path how to get there. Suicidal thoughts creep in once in a while. I don’t want them there at all.
I’m anxious because I don’t feel I’m up to the task. What is my capacity for change at this point of my life? Can I do the work to get there? What work needs to be done and how much? I feel trapped in my own miserable existence. I’m afraid I’ll stay here forever to the day I die…
I’m anxious I’ll never measure up to anything worthwhile or be happy about my life. Ever again.
I’m weary because this is a well-established pattern:
Right now, I’m in the “Waking up” stage. I’m past the “Breaking point.” How do you break this cycle? I haven’t figured it out yet, but the progress and recoveries are cumulative over time, never starting again from square 1. However, every “Breaking point” is perilous.
I feel pretty steady at the moment. Reading good material helps. My meds are kicking a little bit more as well. My mind still wanders when I’m alone, not to thoughts of despair and suicide, but rather of how I think about and understand the world, and reminisce about my past experiences.
I feel like my mind is sprouting and blooming again. Is this what the Christians call “faith”? One little spark starting a fire inside me? A spark small as a match strike, growing much like a forest of Jack Pines after a wildfire?
The turmoil inside of me is spinning down. I’m reconnecting with my dreams and ambitions. I’m starting to take better care of myself.
Apparently, when I’m abysmally depressed, I’m susceptible to obsessing about suicide for one reason or another. In some cases, the feelings I have contain little or no warrant is there for me to feel that way. I would be open to the notion that demons channel their will into my head in those cases, gathered from what I’ve seen and experienced before.
When I have been truly manic on the other hand, which has happened twice so far in my lifetime, I walk the line between the physical and nonphysical. I walk with other people and other beings who seem to be part of what many would call God, yet there’s a strong connection between all parts of the universe itself. I kiss wisdom on the lips and slide back into reality at an utter loss of words at what just happened. I spent part of a decade trying to unwind these 2 experiences, and have hardly gotten anywhere, it seems.
One thing that shines through it all is a certain voice, whether mine or someone/something else’s that always walks the path of love in the level I do not fully understand. Love as a parent’s unconditional love for his or her child. This voice comes from the center of my confusing existence. I can choose to shut it out, like I have been lately.
One major coping addiction I have had while recovering from bipolar was video gaming. Though I have played many games, the biggest culprit of them all was World of Warcraft, where I accumulated well over a year’s worth of playing time alone (yes, logged in and playing the game time, or /played). My video game addiction lasted for years, and I brought out two things from that: 1. I met a few fantastic people online as friends, 2. It kept me out of more serious trouble.
However, the aftermath is hard to deal with. I’ve always liked video games since I was a kid, and the more I played them, the more I wanted to play them as well. Feed 60-80 hours a week of game time for years and that desire to play grew uncontrollable. However, I do not wish to talk about breaking the addiction. I want to talk about where I’m at now.
On occasion, such as these past few days, I get bit by the video game bug. I came home from a wonderful trip out of state to visit my sister and was a little depressed about life after reality sunk in. I found myself playing a lot of video games and started to panic, as I didn’t want to end up back at square one. I decided today I needed to journal about all of this, first of all, and meditate second. Both seem to help and we’ll see how I maintain these next few weeks in avoiding too many video games.
Long sessions alone playing video games only has one benefit: Fun/escaping. However, when I play for a long time, the game can become mind-numbing and lose its appeal… yet I still keep on playing. However, the longer I play them the more nothing is accomplished. Nothing to put down on a resume, to share with other friends outside the game, and they cause many serious problems if left unchecked.
I need to remind myself some things about what happens when I let the video games spiral out of control:
-Employment troubles
-Breakdown in fitness and activity, poor health
-Stuck in the house a lot
-Lose friendships, shallow and strained relationships
-Lack of pursuing interests and writing
-I start to live in my own little world
-Disrupted routine, sleeping, and eating patterns
-My inability to move on in life
And, what do I want in life that video games could easily kill?
-Financial independence from my parents
-Employment
-Continue pursuing my writing ambitions
-A steady routine
-The ability to travel and go places, to do and experience more
-Have good friends and relationships
-Enjoy everything that comes with health and fitness
-Self-discovery, personal development
I realize this is not true for some or perhaps most people who indulge in video games. It is a reality for me, however, and I must be careful. I have more self-restraint in this area than I give myself credit for. I just need to be wary and keep it under check.
theothersid3 