hsphaven

“You were blessed by a different kind of inner view, it’s all magnified
The highs would make you fly, but the lows make you want to die
And I was once there, hanging from that very ledge where you are standing
So I know, I know, I know
It’s easier to let go” 

Missy Higgins, ‘Nightminds‘

When I was a child, my mother described me as a live wire. I had an inner motor that never ran out of fuel. I was constantly running, climbing, moving, bouncing off the walls, smacking people with balloons, rolling down hills, flying through the air on flying foxes, winding the rope swing which hung from our gumtree up until it couldn’t get any tighter and then sitting on it in great delight as it unwound and the world became a blur. When I look at photos of myself when I was about two my mouth would be open so wide that it reminded me of those laughing clown ball machines at carnivals. It looked like I was screaming, but if I was, it would have been out of sheer love for life. My eyes sparkled blue as the ocean. I really was, as s.c lorie @ butterfliesandpebbles wrote, the girl who had sunflowers for eyes and fireworks in her soul.

I barely slept, and didn’t need much sleep. My parents said that I was a wide-eyed child the minute I was born, as though thinking “wow! Isn’t this world amazing!”

My mum said that she would ask other parents if they thought her child was “normal”. I was a force of nature with the energy of a tsunami. One carer said she’d rather look after ten kids than one kid like me.

My mum blames my father for my hyperactivity. She said he was always tossing me around and putting me up trees. But I think it was just me.

As I got older I realised the brutality of this world and didn’t know if there was a place for somebody like me. My life turned into a disenchanted melody. My depression crept up on me slowly. As Elizabeth Wurtzel writes in Prozac Nation, “depression is not a sudden disaster. It is more like a cancer: At first its tumorous mass is not even noticeable to the careful eye, and then one day — wham! — there is a huge, deadly seven-pound lump lodged in your brain or your stomach or your shoulder blade, and this thing that your own body has produced is actually trying to kill you. Depression is a lot like that: Slowly, over the years, the data will accumulate in your heart and mind, a computer program for total negativity will build into your system, making life feel more and more unbearable. But you won’t even notice it coming on, thinking that it is somehow normal, something about getting older, about turning eight or turning twelve or turning fifteen, and then one day you realize that your entire life is just awful, not worth living, a horror and a black blot on the white terrain of human existence. One morning you wake up afraid you are going to live.”

I’ve spent most of the last twelve years of my life in a depression so severe that I needed to be on the disability pension, have had countless admissions to hospital, can barely get dressed and function, and nearly killed myself. All the doctors thought it was major depression and Borderline Personality Disorder and kept telling me to take antidepressants. So I reluctantly agreed. I tried antidepressant after antidepressant but nothing helped. Then one day I was given Effexor. I kept telling my case worker I wanted to stop it and he kept telling me to keep taking it, so I did, and shortly afterwards I flipped into mania. I experienced all the energy I didn’t have for a decade all in one week. I was a completely different person. I was going out all the time, giggling like on drugs, felt like nothing could touch me and felt like everyone was looking at me like I was a god. I write about the experience in detail here. It scared the doctors, and while they were the ones who insisted I take Effexor, now they were begging for me to get off it. I ended up being hospitalised and put on antipsychotics. Then when I returned home I was still not right. They wanted to hospitalise me again, which is when I fled the city.

After that severe manic episode where I also became “psychotic”, according to the doctors, they started thinking I had Bipolar. I didn’t really agree with the diagnosis as I thought it was just a bad reaction to the medication I was taking at the time (Effexor and an ADD stimulant), but as I think about it more I wonder if there is some truth to it. I thought I had ADD, but stimulants have done little for my ADD symptoms. Now I wonder if I have always had Bipolar, and that wild, hyper, exhausting child that I was when I was younger was actually a child that was manic.

I find that I spend most of my time in what are called “mixed episodes”. This is where a person experiences the worst aspects of depression and the worst aspects of mania combined. I still have all that energy I had as a kid but it has become internalised. It feels like my insides are on fire. I can’t sleep, I toss and turn all night and am restless and agitated. I feel “cranked up” all the time but I don’t feel like doing anything. My mood is not good. I feel miserable but with all this energy pulsing through me. Because I feel like crap I want to sleep (unlike when I’m fully manic and having a blast of a time) but I can’t. Mixed episodes have been described as the most dangerous episodes as a person is suicidal and also has the energy to do it.

Mania is not always a fun experience. Sometimes mania manifests as extreme rage, rather than euphoria. In my experience it also feels a lot like anxiety. I get jittery like I’ve drank way too much coffee, and it can be so overwhelming for the system that I can start to dissociate. Sometimes I can get extremely paranoid both when I’ve been extremely high or extremely low. Conversely, sometimes I can become overly trusting of people because everyone and everything seems so wonderful. We can be easily taken advantage of while in a manic episode, and need others to bring us back to earth. Many people do things they later regret, like spending lots of money on things that seem great at the time but lose their magic once we inevitably come down from our high and lose our rose coloured glasses. Something else some people do when they’re manic is give all their belongings away.

I spend most of my time in a state of agitated depression, but I do still occasionally get manic (though it doesn’t tend to last long). The other night a friend asked me why I was texting so much this week.

“I feel like I’ve been upgraded lol what’s going on”, he wrote.

I laughed.

“I don’t know,” I wrote back. “I go through waves. Like I will disappear for ages and then suddenly you will receive months worth of messages all in one week. Consistency is not my best quality. But maybe I am on a roll with you. We have been meeting each week and having some good chats.”

I then told him I felt like going to a night club.

“Lets see if I can keep it up,” I wrote.

Later that night I started getting more and more manic. I posted a lot of songs and personal stuff to Facebook:

“It’s been a crazy week. My aging dad, who I live with, is re-writing his will so that his assets/money will go to my sister and I when he dies. All of his assets/money are in this house, so for my sister to get her share, I will have to sell the house. I will not only lose my dad but will become homeless. I don’t think I will be in any emotional state to deal with all this. I’m barely functioning as it is, and there have been times this week where I’ve wished I will die before my parents so I don’t have to deal with any of this. I’m sick of life, I’m sick of living with the damage psych meds have done to my nervous system, and I’m sick of all my health problems anyway. I’m just starting to accept that pretty much everything is transitory. Everyone leaves. Everyone dies. This house I’m living in will not be permanent. I’ve been having this existential crisis thinking what does anything matter… what do belongings matter, I’m going to die one day and lose it all anyway. I’ve had a hoarding problem the past decade and it’s gonna be absolute hell clearing out the house when the time comes.

As is sung in M*A*S*H:
The game of life is hard to play
I’m gonna lose it anyway
The losing card I’ll someday lay
So this is all I have to say

Enjoy life and relationships while they last but be careful not to get too attached as everything ends. From today I hang onto nothing. Fuck it. Life is brutal. I feel like going clubbing cos I don’t give a shit anymore. I feel like catching a taxi to my friend’s house on the other side of the city in the middle of the night. I feel like randomly catching a vline train to the end of the line. Some of the best things I’ve done were done on impulse, such as jumping in a river in my underwear and fleeing to a friend’s beach house when my doctor tried to commit me. Life’s too short to care what people think of me.”

“Every night I’m awake all fucking night. I feel like this city is a mind prison. My health continues to decline, I’ve been getting spasms and pulsating in my ears and other weird symptoms. Then I recently found out that there are 4 bars of 5G in my street. People don’t think it’s possible to feel this shit, but I don’t know. I feel like this city is becoming unlivable. I think I need to get the hell out of here. I’ve considered just driving my car as far away as possible and sleeping in the backseat until I can find somewhere remote to live. I hope it doesn’t come to that. The car’s full of junk but I have a surge of energy right now which I hope will last till tomorrow so I can clean it in case the time comes when I have to flee”

“I’m so jittery I don’t know if I’m anxious or high”

“She is a force of nature, cycling monthly, bright as the blood or red edge of the moon. At her core, all the wildness of the universe. She is free in her wildness. She is a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belongs to no man and to no city.”

I posted the music video to the song “Song on the Wind” by Dub Sutra, relating to the way a man stuck in a mundane, soulless existence in the city gives away his jacket to a homeless person and walks into the ocean. While doctors may see mania as just a disease, there is usually some kind of profound existential, spiritual bent to my mania.

I posted “Extreme Ways” by Moby. I particularly related to the line “Everything that I owned I threw it out the window”, and “Oh baby, oh baby then it fell apart, it fell apart, oh baby, oh baby like it always does, always does”

And it did fall apart. A friend who knows me well always catches my mania even before I do and can always predict where things are headed. I tried to go away on holiday with her this weekend, but unfortunately was so sick I had to catch a taxi home today. Where I’m at in my menstrual cycle has definitely been exacerbating things and I’m going to see a doctor who specialises in the relationship between hormones and mental health to see if they can shed any light on what the fuck goes on with me.