Tag: episodes
Triggered
Posted on June 19, 2015 in Agitation Mania
The signs are clear: combativeness, difficulty dealing with difficult people, the color red seems unusually intense, and a slight shaking that no one can see but I can sense.
Lost And Desperate
Posted on May 7, 2015 in Anxiety Psychosis
Where had it gone? Where could I have transported it to?
The Sickness of May and June
Posted on May 4, 2015 in Body Language Depression
Curses on the May Disorder. Curses on June Gloom. Sixty days before it passes. Sixty not quite miserable, annoying days.
Accountability and the Grim Facts of Depression
Posted on April 22, 2015 in Anxiety Attitudes Compassion Depression Guilt
The black spiral literally knocked me off my feet. I decided on my own to stop taking Geodon — a horrible drug that left me dizzy for all but the last three to four hours of my waking day — and I crashed and crashed hard. My bedroom was my habitation; my cats my constant companions. I felt the after effects for months — a dimness of the world, a heaviness on the brain, and difficulty forming thoughts. Shortly after I emerged from more than a week of never moving from the bed, I wrote:
I count nine days of nothing but turning on my bed, sleeping on the best of them, just clutching blankets on the worst. I run back and forth writing, thinking, and hiding under the covers for this one. That’s my activity and I need to make more. I’d be at the gym working out except I took two Ativan and do not wish to risk the drive. And it is too hot and unshaded for the walk around the condos that I have made my regimen.
Coming “back” implies seemingly ridiculous victories. Today you brush your teeth. You take one less Ativan. You go for that walk twice at dawn like you should. You write in your journal. You blog. All in between visits to the bed, your teacher and your protector.
Just yesterday, I heeded studies which suggest that spirituality helps those suffering from depression and mixed and remixed the books next to my bed until I found a pocket Buddhist companion. This (translated into the objects of depression) made sense to me:
I am not my depression. My depression is not me. The world is not my depression.
This doesn’t say that I lie under the covers for not discernible cause and it doesn’t say to stop taking the meds as appropriate. It simply separates my disease in the same manner as one might separate the eye or the ear. My eye is not me. I am not my eye. My eye is not the world.
We get into an ownership thing in Western thinking — if not throughout the whole world. We own our body parts and our diseases rather than seeing them as causes. They are neither separate of us nor part of us. They are facts.
This gives me personal relief from this nine day good-riddance if rid of it that I am. And I’d rather not talk more about this. It makes sense to me.
The InterNet Argument Addict
Posted on March 5, 2015 in Addictions Anger Frustration Mania Netiots
Difficult to end when I am feeling stable but energized and impossible when I am manic, InterNet disputes are a drug of choice for me. I just ended an exchange that went on for over an hour with someone on Facebook. She would not stop and neither would I. It seemed to me that no matter what I said to refute her, she kept repeating the same thing over and over. My ire was up: I had a defense to make and, equally important, someone to skewer. Then in the middle of it, I realized that I had become a Facebook Mr. Hyde, shared one last anecdote, and announced the end of my participation. Others have responded to the thread since then and I have not read what they said. Whether they indict me or stand up for me, I shall not involve myself anymore.
Long ago — on the abUSENET, I learned that it was a waste of time arguing against the trolls and cranks of the Net. If I spent a long time preparing an intelligent rebuttal to something they said, they’d dismiss it with a brute-force remark or lame witticism. Some even went so far as to create robots that would repeat the same argument every time certain key words appeared anywhere in the newsgroups. You could easily exhaust yourself fighting these. I gave it up for the Web because I realized that the newsgroups were a waste of time.
