There, my unborn self sits, quivering in agony. I was there before anything on that other realm of existence, which I couldn’t seem to snap to. I am lost and alone, scraping on the figurative, imprisoning brick walls of infinity to change that. What so-called [billionth year?] is it in the universe? Is there still time left?
Everything is going in circles ad infinitum. There is no answer… But there HAS to be!
I speak in words.
-theothersid3
Demonic darkness
coils through my mind-heart and soul.
Twisted parasite.
Eats my energy
feeds on filth, obscenities.
Rots away love, light.
The Reiki Master
Draws a picture of this deep,
Darkest attachment.
Image verbatim,
the demon grabbed me, age 4,
teeth, claws wrapped me up
I can see its face,
filthy, sour, dark eyes with jaws
so cold, so alone.
Noxious energy
fills my flesh and my spirit.
Wounds, sores develop.
Thoughts infiltrate me.
Influence, strings in my mind.
Unmentionables.
I feel so hopeless,
lifelong attachment, for if
it goes, so do I.
I must not return
to my own vomit like dogs
as Proverbs once said.
Miracles are real –
a blinding crash of lightning
plucked it out of me.
Faith, not magic here.
No magic ceremonies,
My spirit intact.
Within an instant,
my thoughts and feelings return.
They are now my own.
-theothersid3
“Feed my lambs!” wailed God,
Yahweh, void of sanity:
Fed his lambs Godflesh.
The darkest anguishes
Felt by God and felt by me,
Heal by means of time.
When time ends, all is
Shalom and the pain subsides:
Darkness tamed at last.
photo credit: Boobook48 Moving the sheep via photopin (license)
When I am truly hurt, everything is hopeless, and nothing seems to work, I will lie down and put on some music. When I’ve completely lost myself and I’m utterly afraid, I do my best to let everything go and I find that there is love and hope, always. This is one song I cherish:
Forget the peace inside
You’ve given way to the gods of destruction
Full of desire
You feel afraid that there’s nothing left
Oh oh, oh no
Oh oh, oh no
The ocean is dry
Do you feel hollow?
Nowhere to hide
And nothing to swallow
And when you can’t recognize
Anything solid
Where do you turn?
When you can’t buy it?
What can you believe in now
With no love to follow?
Now that you have lost yourself
Oh, can anything help you now?
Just let your fears go
You might find your way back home
Let your fears go
You might find that you’re not lost
Just let your fears go
You might find your way back home
Let your fears go
You might find that you’re not lost
What did you learn?
What was it worth?
What did you yearn for?
Everything’s lost now
And not alone and not alone
And not alone and not alone
And not alone and not alone
And not alone and not alone
Just let your fears go
You might find your way back home
Let your fears go
You might find that you’re not lost
Just let your fears go
You might find your way back home
Let your fears go
You might find that you’re not lost
photo credit: Dragon Tree via photopin (license)
What follows are highlights of a rather long journal entry I made 10 years ago approximately 2 months after I was diagnosed bipolar and hospitalized. I was 17 at the time, and it was after a psychotic episode I had that revved up over the preceding six months or so and triggered by 4 days with no sleep at all.
Part of my treatment was in a crisis stabilization unit out of state on our family Christmas vacation, and the other portion was partial hospitalization in my home town because we couldn’t afford full hospitalization. I was on Risperdal right after my inpatient treatment, which dulled everything. I couldn’t handle it, so I begged my psychiatrist to reduce my dose. I became more unstable shortly after, my depression and mania magnified both at the same time, while allowing me to write more freely. I tried to stay positive, but I was in the middle of a storm at the same time. Here are highlights of this moment.
3-28-2004
-Feelings Journal Entry: exhausted, confused, guilty, angry, frustrated, sad, confident, happy, ashamed, depressed, overwhelmed.
– I woke up this morning wanting to kill myself to end the pain, and now I feel pretty good. Craziness.
-I’m writing now because my emotions are swirling in my head, and I don’t know how to express myself. I just want to throw up somewhere, and I’ll just do it here in writing.
– I wonder if I’m just being weak and lazy.
-Then I have bipolar thrown into the equation. And this word “equation” kills me – I am trying to calculate where all this is coming from – my past, present, illness, medication, or lack of will power. I’m sick of it. What’s me? My therapist showed me that I can keep the things that I like about myself, and reject and fight the disease that takes my strengths to the extreme – high or low.
-But yesterday and today, I woke up and didn’t feel like getting out of bed at all. Anything that requires effort seems to me no point in doing. It’s like I’m stuck in a rut and there’s no point in pulling myself out or making the effort even to grab someone else’s helping hand because I don’t experience the pleasure for long and I just slump back down. I don’t feel like doing anything productive, getting out of bed, doing research and homework, fixing food, playing guitar, taking a shower, going out with friends, planning events, going for a walk, maintaining relationships.
– I hope that this is not normal, and bipolar is involved – but I don’t want to use this as a crutch, and aren’t the meds supposed to take care of it?
-But there’s still this remnant left. One moment, I’m alone in my room or taking a walk and all I can think about is suicide. I just get more depressed and I feel exhausted over anything that requires effort, and I just want it to stop and just go away forever into heaven.
-But I’m suicidal one moment and I make an effort to get up, and I engage in activities, and the feelings of joy do return, and it’s little things. Little things are magnified throughout my days and I feel them fluctuate. This not only plays into my moods but in my concentration as well. I have a harder time concentrating and I tend to do things quite slowly.
-There’s something about her that really attracts me, how loving, and caring she is to people, and she knows what to say to give comfort. God used her picture there [in the crisis unit] to prevent me from slitting my own wrists.
-I’m still low on the self-confidence issue. First, there’s my body image. My gut is starting to sag, and I’m not eating healthily. I don’t have the drive to exercise like I used to. I went nuts, and my body and other peoples’ reactions show it. Eating is now a comfort for me to deal with my problems.
-I’m shy around people, and I don’t know how to handle conversations; did my bipolar have an effect on this? Am I social or am I not? I’m so confused.
-I’m also having a lot of problems with cognition. Things seem to always go in one ear and out the other, or if it stays in my head, I have a hard time finding it, let alone think about it. That is, compared to what I was like before I was on all these meds, particularly Risperdal.
– I still remember in the crisis unit when I got my first dose of Abilify. I was supposed to write a paragraph about why I was on the unit and after the medicine started kicking in, the thoughts and connections in my head started to become numb, one by one, along with all desires. It slowly started to paralyze me, till I couldn’t tell what I was thinking and I could write nothing down.
– Maybe the decrease in Risperdal will let me feel more normal. I’m worried about being in charge of anything, in general. Before, I was used to being the driven one and took on leadership roles. Now, the drive is not there, and I cannot keep track of many things let alone my own homework assignments.
– It’s awful for me to make the first few marks on the paper in art, to improvise in jazz, to follow conversations. I wish I were more spontaneous and loose. Oh, dancing is another good example of what I mean, but this one always was. I simply can’t dance. If somebody asks me what the music feels or looks like, I stand there like a rod. It seems like my ability to do art and conversation is fading to the point of my inability to dance.
-My therapist says this is important for me in relation to my bipolar, as life can throw earthquakes at times, but I don’t understand this yet. I don’t know how the role of being released in tough situations plays with bipolar, yet, because I haven’t had any quakes thrown at me yet with me being consciously aware of my disorder.
-I’m also reliving some of the experiences in the hospitals – both in and out of state.
-I wish these spells of thinking about inviting suicide would go away. Mom wonders if they’re spiritual attacks.
-I’m so glad that I’m not writing too furiously like I was when I was manic, believing that I have the revolutionary book that will change society. Sorry, that was kind of random.
-Mom, grandma, and aunt Bell are still not on speaking terms. It is partly my job to mop up the mess I created in the family the past few months. I dunno what to say. I wish my head was a little more clear.
-As far as the disease of bipolar vs. who I am is concerned, I wish I could keep all the good things, but sometimes my disorder enables me to be the good things or prevents me from being the good things. I wish I could control it.
There is hope that the agonies associated with the psychotropics journey all people with bipolar undergo fade away.
The journey involves finding the medications that work and patiently discarding the ones that didn’t after giving them a fair chance. It is a mind-numbing process in the most literal sense, as many bipolar meds end up taking away cognition, drive, and emotional capacity to promote normal functioning. It was incredibly frustrating when I discovered a medication was useless for me as it felt like a wasted effort at times.
Then I find a med regime that works, and adjustments to make when bad things happen.
Then those “side effects” start to dissipate, and I begin to feel normal most of the time.
After that, I reach a point where I start to reduce my meds with my doctor’s blessing, which is a joyful, profoundly baffling experience. I know I’ll always need medication, but I get pieces of me back which I forget about by reducing them and eliminating some.
The worst thing I did was to stop my meds without my doctor’s blessing: bipolar then proceeded to stab me in the back. The last time I stopped my meds for two months I ended up in the hospital for over a month with a severe break on my hands to recover from.
Have any of you stopped your meds? What happened, why did you stop them, and how long did you stop them? What are psychotropics doing for you now – good and bad?
I just want to put it out there that bipolar I is not who I am… It’s something I have. When I live out my day, I don’t tell most people I’m bipolar, nor do I think about bipolar. It’s become a small part of me, but I choose to reflect on it so I can write about it for others who struggle with all of this.
When I was first diagnosed, bipolar was the biggest part of who I was, and at times it was me. When I lived out my days, I’d tell most people I met that I’m bipolar, and couldn’t stop thinking about bipolar. It became all of who I was, and I couldn’t stop writing about it and thinking about it to figure out what the heck was going on. I vented to friends and family a lot about it, burning many people out.
I still remember the moment I was diagnosed, that the doctor said I would lead a relatively normal life. He was right, as much as in the past I wanted to slap him in the face for what he said as it seemed impossible. It’s taken over ten years for normality to become reality, and it’s worth all the hard work, no questions asked.
Do you know any people who are mental illness survivors?
Hi, I am making the shift from .tumblr to WordPress. My old page is at:
http://the-other-sid3.tumblr.com/
As of now, I’m an anonymous male in my late twenties, who has been diagnosed with bipolar I (a bad form of manic depressive illness) for over ten years. I’ve gotten things together pretty well. Now I intend to write about my experiences mostly for the benefit of other people going through similar things that I did, and to reinforce my belief that bad things happen for many reasons.
My dream that I’m breaking down into goals now is to publish a nonfiction book of my two psychotic episodes I experienced in 2003 and 2009. Many ideas are on the table, especially writing it in the form of stream of consciousness. My blog will serve as a record and an outlet as I embark on this long journey.
For the longest time, I knew no one who experienced something like a psychotic break, and this made me feel lonely, alienated. To those who have experienced the profound horrors of a break/episode/psychosis/whatever-you-want-to-call-it, I hope to put this book out there to vividly demonstrate they are not alone and normality can become reality.
I appreciate any feedback and suggestions, and any support you give is treasured.
Do any of you know someone who has bipolar? Are you bipolar? Please share your thoughts about this project I’m beginning to embark on.
theothersid3 