“…how are things since the decision?” Gabriel asked in a comment on my last post, which I wrote over a month ago. I had decided that I didn’t want to ask my doctor to increase the dosage of my Epival. I figured I would ride it out and be all right on the current dosage.

This was indeed the way things were working out, but then I went off meds for a few weeks. On purpose, because I am stupid. Hypomania can be fun. It is not fun nearly as often as most people assume it is, though, or at least it isn’t for me. The times when I am sure I am connected to every other atom in the universe are few and far between compared to the times that all the overload is too much and everything in the universe annoys me. For every hypomanic episode where I am actually productive, I have tons where I go to bed and try to go to sleep but I can’t, so I wind up staring at the ceiling and around the room for six hours, because I am too awake to manage to close my eyes. I am not up at night writing the Great Canadian Novel or cleaning my room or even blogging, because I am too tired for that, but I am still. so. damn. AWAKE and my thoughts keep racing but there’s nothing I can do with them. Even though I’m exhausted, I still have so much energy that I can’t keep still while I lie there. Instead I kick and fidget so much that my muscles are sore for days afterwards, and I flap my hands and hit them off things until I worry that I actually might break a finger.

Anyway, that’s not even what’s been really bugging me lately, although of course I have been having some nights like that. I’m mainly just ashamed of myself. I know I shouldn’t go off meds without telling anybody, but I did it anyway, and I’m ashamed of that. When I am ashamed of myself, I don’t want to write any posts. I don’t want people to know that I’m being a dumbass. I’ve held things together quite well overall, but now I’m starting to scare myself a bit, so I’m going back on meds. My bank account can’t handle this hypomania, and it hasn’t done anything positive for me except make my life a little bit more interesting. It would be fun to have an I Love Everything and Everything Loves Me episode, but this isn’t one of those. You would think that by now I would have realized that I can’t make them happen.

Overall, I am fine, though. You likely wouldn’t notice that anything was out of the ordinary. But I do. It’s good that I can keep the slight trouble I’m having with things like anger and paranoia under control… but I’d really rather that I didn’t have to wrestle with these things. I’d really rather that they were non-issues. Hence, meds.

Speaking of keeping things under control, though… You know those statistics that tell you that (some large number)% of people who suffer from manic depression also have substance abuse problems? I’d thought for a long time that I’d dodged that particular bullet. In the past few months, though, I’ve realized that I have a problem with what Experimental Chimp wonderfully termed “binge drinking and consequent inappropriate-yet-impossible-to-remember-behaviour.” I don’t think I really want to say any more about that right now, though. I’ve already babbled enough.

I don’t like writing posts that are All About Me, by the way. Or at least not all about me as I am right now. I’d rather talk about something I read in the newspaper or on another website, or tell stories about stuff I did/that was done to me Back When I Was Crazy. Because, you know, for the most part, I am “well” now. Whenever I mention currently having any symptoms whatsoever of bipolar disorder, I feel that it smacks of failure. I guess if I was really 100% “well” and “recovered,” I would be so mentally healthy that such things wouldn’t faze me at all and I wouldn’t see them as failures. But I don’t think I’ll ever be that well.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 11:18 pm and is filed under Meds, Sleep, Hypomania, Substance Abuse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.