Posted on June 25, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Genes
The moral of this story is that you are not damned by your genes. They are not a curse, they are not predestination.
Posted on June 21, 2015 in Body Language Calm Daily Life Mania Photos Travels - So Cal
Two doses of Xanax in succession seem to have brought me out of the mania.
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.
Posted on June 16, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Psycho-bunk Reflections
I asked her to show me a study that showed that this self-identification was harmful. Silence.
Posted on June 15, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Medications Video
Posted on June 5, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Psychotropics Video
A video describing the various medications that I have been on and their effects on me.
Posted on May 26, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Video
A video in which I describe how I came to be diagnosed during my one and only hospitalization
Posted on May 15, 2015 in Bipolar Disorder Gratitude
It is nice to know that I am seen out there along some of the best.
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.
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.
Posted on April 17, 2015 in Depression Mania Memory Reflections Stigma
What could they have said to a raging bullshit artist?
Posted on April 16, 2015 in Exuberance Mania Religion
Let this be written for those who come after and those who live now so that they may understand.