When I was a bit younger, I used to have really bad PMS. It was probably bad enough to be diagnosed as PMDD, but if anybody ever did diagnose me as such, they didn’t tell me. Every time I attempted suicide, I think it was just before or during my period. The worst thing about it was that my period was also extremely irregular, so I never even knew when the PMS was coming. Although there was a good side to that, too — I’d suddenly become intensely suicidal, but when my period would come, I’d be so relieved to know that there was a concrete reason for my mood, I wasn’t “going crazy” again, and I’d be feeling better in a few days. That’s an amazing sense of relief to have.

This was a major issue for me until I started taking the birth control pill. I wanted to start taking it a few years before I actually did, but I couldn’t find a doctor who would prescribe it for me. The reason? I was on Topamax, and Topamax can sometimes make oral contraceptives less effective. This only holds true if you’re on 200 mg or more daily, and I think I was on 100 mg at the time, but who’s counting?

How did I eventually get prescribed oral contraceptives? Well, one day I went to a clinic to get the morning after pill (yes, we’d been using protection, but we had a condom breakage issue) and when the doctor was asking me some questions, I told her that this was the third or fourth occasion that I’d taken emergency contraceptives (over a span of three years).

She said, “Polly, Polly, Polly, what are we going to do with you?”

She had never seen me before in her life.

I said, “Well, for starters, somebody could prescribe me the birth control pill!”

And so she did. Yes, she knew that I was taking Topamax and that it could make the Pill less effective. I should point out that the other doctors I’d asked about birth control had all been male.

I never took the morning after pill again. I have never been pregnant. A couple years later, I stopped taking Topamax.

I know that oral contraceptives cause really bad mood swings in some women, but they actually help prevent them for me. It’s also nice having my menstrual cycle regulated, so that I know when a possible time of PMS is coming up. On the other hand, since I now only rarely get depressed and irritable before I get my period, there’s still that element of surprise. If I’ve gone for many months without PMS, I’m not expecting it to happen.

Which is why last week, I spent a couple of days feeling like I wanted to go lie down in traffic, but was cheered up when I realized that I only felt that was because of PMS. Then I got a little too cheered up, because I had an insomnia thing going on, and I got hypomanic. I was so jumpy and hyper that I was seriously afraid that I was going to have to call in sick to work one day because of it. I had a cup of coffee the day before, like an idiot — I try not to drink coffee at all normally, and when I’m hypomanic, coffee is an incredibly bad idea. IT MAKES MY BRAIN FEEL LIKE IT IS JUMPING UP AND DOWN. AND IT MAKES ME FEEL LIKE EVERY NERVE IN MY BODY IS JUMPING UP AND DOWN INSIDE MY SKIN, TOO. And that’s actually a lot of fun, even if my pitiful, inaccurate attempts to describe it make it sound uncomfortable. The uncomfortable part comes because I. Can’t. Keep. Still. and any situation that would require me to stay still is horrible for me. If I’ve got free rein to climb on stuff and do whatever I want, then it’s tons of fun.

You see why this might be a problem when I’m at work, though.

I guess caffeine does this to a lot of people, but if you are not manic-depressive, I don’t think that ONE CUP OF COFFEE can make you feel like this for TWELVE HOURS STRAIGHT before you start to come down a little.

Anyway, I somehow started feeling a lot more subdued, and I was able to go to work, and it was all good.

Um, I have no idea where I was going with this. I’m still a wee bit on the hypomanic side, but not in a bad way. Oh, yeah. I wanted to mention that although I don’t eat as well as I should, for a long time now I’ve been doing really well at trying to make sure my sleep schedule is as regular as possible, because I know how important it is for me to sleep properly if I want to stay well.

Ha ha ha, I’m standing up at the computer again because I’m still not so awesome with the sitting still. Sit down, you.

Anyway, my sleep being messed up through no fault of my own and the subsequent consequences provided me with additional proof that I should definitely stick to a regular sleeping schedule. I’m so much more stable when I do. I know, duh, right? Although the insomnia wasn’t brought on by anything I did, for a few days I didn’t try hard enough to get my schedule back on track, and that only served to remind me that it is dumb not to try to get enough sleep. It is also dumb for me to oversleep, or to sleep at weird times, especially since I have a more-or-less nine-to-five kind of job.

I’m trying harder now, though. For really.

I’ve been having a rough week. This used to be de rigeur for me, but now that I’m so stable most of the time and don’t have random severe mood swings caused by nothing whatsoever, I tend to forget that I can still have major mood swings triggered by physical things such as my sleep schedule being all messed up. Which it is right now. I try to keep a much more regular sleep schedule than I used to, because I know how important it is to my mental health. Overall, it works out pretty well… but no matter how hard I try, it doesn’t work all the time.

So now there is insomnia leading to rapid-fire mood swings, and even though it’s not nearly as bad as it used to be a few years ago, I still find it disturbing. I find it disturbing simply because I’m not used to it anymore. I didn’t used to have a normal baseline mood. Now that I do have one, it’s kind of freaky to watch myself deviate from it. I’m not even worried that things will get worse; I’m really not. I know I’ve got everything under control. It’s just unsettling to be going along for a while not having to try particularly hard to keep everything under control, and then all of a sudden having to work at it again.

Things I wanted to do tonight: Heat up frozen mini-pizzas and eat them, take a shower, do two loads of laundry, write a long blog post, pack my bags for the long weekend. This doesn’t sound too hard, does it?

Things I managed to do tonight: Eat Lunchmates (using the oven and washing dishes seemed way too complex), do one load of laundry, start writing a blog post, get distracted in the middle of it because I’m trying to find a certain envelope that had stuff written on it, wander around looking for the envelope, get really frustrated that I can’t find it, think I should clean the bedroom but I don’t want to, sit back down and try to write the blog post but instead find myself rocking back and forth. I’ll pack in the morning. I’ll shower tomorrow night. No, I’ll take a bath tomorrow night. You don’t even have to stand up to do that. Scrap the blog post that was supposed to be long and semi-meaningful, and start writing this one instead.

I hate that sometimes, even when I’m not particularly depressed or hypomanic, I still can’t do things that everybody else can do. I mean I literally can’t do them. At work, I am always organized, often hyperfocused, and have no problem multitasking. In the rest of my life, though, the simplest tasks frequently seem unbearably complex. Tonight the thought of washing my hair or turning on the oven made me want to crumple into a little heap. I’m not even sad. I’m not even tired. I’m not having particularly intrusive racing thoughts. I’m not just being lazy, either. Trust me — I’m lazy frequently enough to know when I’m being lazy! I’ve got plenty of experience in that area.

I’m not always like this. Just far more often than I’d like to be.

It had been a long time since I checked out the artwork at explodingdog, but I went there last night, and I’ve felt just like this little guy so many times in the past that when I saw him, I almost cried.

I started this blog a year ago today, but I’m far too tired to come up with any blogiversary-worthy Deep Thoughts about What I Have Learned in the past year. I’ve been really tired all week. At first I worried that I was getting depressed, but then I realized that almost everybody I know has a cold or the flu or some virus or other. I am not sick, but it seems highly likely that trying to stay not sick is completely exhausting me. Being run-down like this is certainly better than having stomach flu, though, so I ain’t complaining. Since I am not up to spewing forth Really Deep Thoughts (not that I ever am), instead I will simply share with you what are probably my favourite lines of poetry ever:

On a razor edge of reality,
I knew I would come out of this, bleeding and broken,
and singing.
~ Gwendolyn MacEwan, “Deraa”

Speaking of What I Have Learned, yes, it’s true that a year ago, I knew that I had already come out of “this,” bleeding & broken & singing, and that I would be likely to do so repeatedly. I do become surer and surer of this fact as time goes on, though, and I guess that’s a kind of learning, too. Sometimes I forget that I’ll get better every time I get worse, but I have been remembering it more and more often in the past couple of years, and for longer and longer periods of time.

New Year’s. A friend asked all of us what we hoped for in the year to come.

“I want to not fuck up,” I said. Felt tears pricking at the corners of my eyes, realized these people had never seen me cry, which feels so weird, because I have always been used to absolutely everyone who comes into contact with me at all seeing me cry at one point or another. But although the people present were close friends of mine, they have only been so for less than a year and a half. During most of that time, I have been the New, Improved Polly on medication that actually works for me.

Did not want them to see me cry now. Had to explain that I wasn’t really being upset and maudlin, that I was actually trying to be positive.

“It’s just that I went all through 2007 without fucking up,” I said. “I was sick for so long, and the past year was the first year that I’ve been well. I just want things to stay that way.”

I then almost immediately proceeded to come dangerously close to fucking up.

I spent the next few weeks hypomanic in a bad way. Yelled at people for no reason. Obsessed endlessly about certain things. You don’t even want to hear about my sex drive during those weeks (hint: really, really high). Drank way too much, alone. Spent too much money.

With little warning and absolutely no fanfare, I slipped into a mild depression and stayed there for a few more weeks. Believed I would never be happy again. Wondered what was the point of anything. Continued to occasionally drink too much, alone. Had to try very hard to keep from cutting myself. Sent disturbing emails to friends about wanting to cut myself. Only managed not to cut myself because I knew my two-year anniversary of not cutting would be coming up soon, and I really wanted to make it to two years without screwing up.

Then woke up one morning and felt better, just like that. Not caused by anything. Nothing had changed except for my mood. The weather was still utter wintery crap, but it suddenly wasn’t bringing me down anymore. (Seriously, if you are not in Canada right now, stay away from this country until at least May. I am not joking.) I still had the same slight personal problems I’d had for a while, but I was suddenly able to look at them rationally and not blow things out of proportion. It’s so weird when you wake up and all of a sudden you are well. It’s also weird when you wake up and all of a sudden you are unwell, but I don’t like that one quite as much. I can’t help but think of it as some cosmic dude or dudette mucking about with a remote that controls my emotions.

I had been seriously considering asking my doctor about increasing my medication when I saw her, but ultimately I didn’t, since I wasn’t having problems functioning and my mood swings were quite tame compared to the way they used to be a year and a half ago. I figured I could deal with it without more drugs, but afterward I worried that maybe it was stupid and pigheaded of me.

Now that I feel better, though, I’m pleased to see that this was indeed the best decision for me at this time. I’m glad I got through that rough patch while remaining on only a minimal amount of medication.

Interesting post at Furious Seasons recently (heh, as if there were not an interesting post there nearly every day!) regarding manic depression as a dangerous gift, as a personality disorder, and as something from which one can completely recover.

I know I am going out on a limb here that someone will likely chop off for me, but I believe that much of what we call bipolar disorder is in fact a personality disorder or constellation of behavioral issues.

I’m not looking to chop off this limb. I view manic depression as a dangerous gift as well, and as something that maybe at least some people can completely recover from. I also understand that Philip is not saying all a person with bipolar disorder has to do to recover is pull themselves up by their bootstraps:

I think bipolar disorder can be a personality disorder–and, nitpickers be warned, I am using the term very broadly–more often than it is a mental illness.

Depression–and here I am not discussing major or clinical depression–is widely known as having a huge personality component.

Mania itself–and here I mean the bad old wild delusions, hallucinations and declarations of Godhead mania–is not a personality disorder. When it’s in full flower, mania is straight-up insanity.

Dysphoric mania is possibly the least fun thing in the world, but there is at least one good thing about it: once you’ve recovered from an episode of psychotic dysphoric mania, it’s really hard to convince yourself that it was a character flaw. You can easily convince yourself that you weren’t depressed, just stupid and lazy, and that you weren’t hypomanic, you were just being a silly, reckless whore… but after having auditory hallucinations for a few weeks straight, once I finally stopped, I realized that something had been really wrong and that this time it wasn’t my fault.

I was aware that most of the time, medication either made me a zombie or made my moods even worse. So sometimes I would stop taking medication, be fine for a few months, and then be much, much worse than before. I learned to do things that sometimes stopped mood episodes, but more often just allowed me to cope with the symptoms I experienced, so that I functioned very well as one of the walking wounded. For quite a long time, I honestly believed that there was no such thing as getting better, there was only becoming a better liar, so that you could hide your pain from others and even from yourself. Or at least I thought that was the only option for me, because I’d read about other people who were asymptomatic for long periods of time, who claimed to experience “growth” and “healing.” I didn’t disbelieve them, but I didn’t think that anything would work for me. I tried CBT, DBT skills, family therapy, couples therapy, group therapy, exercise, meditation, hospitalization, acupuncture, journalling, medication, medication, medication, and other stuff… but the hits just kept coming. I kept getting depressed, I kept getting hypomanic, and I kept getting manic.

Some of those things helped. Some didn’t. (Acupuncture, for instance, was supposed to make me less stressed, but instead it turned me into a stressed person with needles in her ears.) For nearly a decade, though, none of them prevented me from having mood episodes, which I dealt with using a combined method of actual coping skills plus being way, way too hard on myself. I have been essentially non-syndromal for the past year, though, and it seems to be solely because I’m finally on medication that’s working for me.

I am better, and I want this to be an accomplishment. I wish this were something I could take credit for. But it’s not.

The journey to get to this point was so long and arduous that I want the current solution to be complex. (I say “current solution” because although this has been the solution for the past year, I don’t assume it will be the solution that works best for me forever.) It’s not complex, though. It’s not intricate. I-take-two-pills-a-day-and-now-I-am-well. If I am experiencing any side effects, I am not aware of them. I still have emotions. I can cry when really bad things happen, I can take joy in something as simple as seeing furry gray squirrels race across tree branches, and I can write really bad fiction.

Despite how hard I tried to get better, I still can’t take any responsibility for it. It’s true that I learned plenty of things along the way, including just how vast the extent of my own ignorance is (and how ignorant many of my doctors were), but nothing I learned was instrumental in my actual recovery. I tried and tried and tried to save myself, yet I did not.

I wish I’d fixed it. I know I should be careful what I wish for. I’ll say that I wish I’d slain the dragon myself and the next thing you know, the meds will poop out and the dragon will pop back up, all scaly and fire-breathing, saying, “You called? Here I am, bitch. Come and get me.”

But still. I wish I’d fixed it.

I’m going to assume without even checking that everyone in various mental health blog circles has read this story already. The original article was published five days ago, which in Internet time is the equivalent of about eight thousand years. I link to things I find interesting more so that I can find them again if I want to than to point them out to other people. I don’t actually want to think about this ever again because it makes me feel sick, but unfortunately it’s not the kind of thing that anybody can afford to ignore. I have way too many things to do right now to take the time to make any kind of thoughtful commentary, and really, I’m glad about that, because I suspect that words would fail me if I tried to say anything about this unfathomable cruelty.

Oh, and if you want to know the name of the vile excuse for a human being who emotionally tortured Megan Meier, you can find it in the comments on this post. Her address and phone number are there, too… that is, if she hasn’t changed her number already.

Never thought I’d see the day that I’d consider myself lucky that when I was thirteen, the ex-friend who bullied me told me to my face that I should kill myself. But I got through stuff like that much better than I think I would have if her mother had also been fucking with my mind, too.

Stumbling back, blinking confusedly and wondering what happened to the past week.

My brother was released from the hospital after nine days there. My mom says he is doing okay, but she worries about him all the time. She is worried about what he’ll do the next time he and his girlfriend have a fight. They’re always fighting. He told her that if she took that job this summer, he’d kill himself. She took the job, he didn’t kill himself or try to kill himself, but he did have to spend nine days in the hospital.

I’m a bit hypomanic. Nothing extreme, mainly I’m kind of hypersexual and I’m also feeling like it’s stupid to be taking my medication. Usually, if I’m not taking my medication properly or if I stop taking it altogether, it really is because of the side effects. I am not the stereotypical “she stopped taking her pills because she thought she didn’t need them anymore” manic-depressive. (Almost nobody is, by the way. People just think that we are because they don’t actually believe us when we tell them how bad the side effects are.)

But I am that stereotype right now. Or at least I would be if I actually stopped taking my pills, which I have not. I want to, though. I feel so good right now. How could there possibly be anything wrong with me? Why would I possibly need drugs?

Twice in the past, I went off all of my meds without telling my doctor. I didn’t think that I wasn’t manic-depressive; I just thought I could handle it better without the drugs. Both times, I felt fine for a little while. Both times, things changed. The first time was a bit more gradual. It started out as mild paranoia, then moved to severe paranoia and delusions, and then added auditory hallucinations. Now, that was a fun six months. The second time was much more sudden. A case of severe insomnia turned overnight into serious suicidality and helped set off a chain of hospitalizations. All of that funstuff is why I decided that although I would try taking lower dosages of medication, and although I would stop taking Dope-a-max and atypical antipsychotics, I probably shouldn’t take no medication at all.

Right now, though, I feel like I’m talking about someone else. I have a hard time believing that I was ever ill. It feels like it was all a dream. I am fine. There’s nothing wrong with me. Why would I need pills?

I went to Shoppers tonight to get a prescription filled, and while I waited, I read their HealthWATCH pamphlet on Emotional Health. I was flabbergasted by the following excerpt, which I am not making up:

Doctors refer to conditions that affect emotional health as “mood disorders.” They include:

• depression
• anxiety
• stress
• bipolar disorder (manic depression)

Seriously, what the hell? Were people high when they wrote this pamphlet? Since when is stress a mood disorder? Or anxiety, either, but labelling stress a “mood disorder” is particularly stupid, since that would mean that every single person in the entire world has suffered from a mood disorder at one time or another. Sure, stress affects emotional health, but that doesn’t make it a mood disorder. An especially baffling thing about the wacky pamphlet is that there is a section on the Shoppers Drug Mart web site about emotional health, expanding upon what is in the pamphlet, and it doesn’t include a ridiculous statement about stress being a mood disorder, but does include a subsection called More than just stress which contains the line, “Because some signs of depression are similar to those that occur with stress, having some of these signs does not necessarily mean that you have depression.” Which, you know, actually makes sense.

Maybe people realized that whoever was in charge of their Emotional Health stuff was doling out very obvious misinformation and it was a lot simpler to fix the site than to fix the pamphlets?