Welcome to Rapid Cycling. Population: me.

(The image above is a magnet I have on my refrigerator.)

Lately I have been up-down-up-down-up-down. Usually rapid cycling is a February-March-April thing for me, and I start easing out of it around this time of year. Susan at Bipolar Wellness Writer recently wrote two good posts about seasonal aspects of depression and manic depression, Ebbs and Flows and Seasonal Affective Disorder. I can relate, as there is definitely a seasonal component to my illness.

I tend to have an overarching mood pattern of being very depressed from late September to early February, then hypomanic/manic until mid-May, then relatively normal or mildly hypomanic until late September. But I also tend to have cycles within cycles, especially in the February-to-May cycle. Then I often bounce from euphoric to dysphoric hypomania (and occasionally mania) to depression and back again, in random order, for random periods of time. The spring is my prime rapid cycling time, but that doesn’t mean it never happens at other times of year. I usually feel good during the summer, but sometimes I have episodes of depression then. I’m usually depressed during the fall and early winter, but sometimes I’ll be Doing Just Fine or I’ll have brief periods of hypomania.

For nearly five months, I have been Doing Just Fine with some ventures into mild hypomania now and then. For the past few days, though, I have been up and down frequently. I know some reasons why, of course. My current jobs have very variable hours and I don’t do so well when I’m not following a stricter schedule of sleeping and eating and working and leisure time. My problems with finding adequate treatment have also been frustrating me lately. (Experimental Chimp does a good job of blogging about his struggle to find adequate treatment, by the way.)

You ever notice that if someone already has you tagged with borderline personality disorder, then any time you admit that an actual life stressor is affecting your mood somehow, it’s seen as further confirmation that you have BPD? I know there’s supposed to be a “marked reactivity of mood,” but aren’t manic-depressives, or, God forbid, even people without any psychiatric diagnosis, permitted to have some reaction to things that have actually happened to them? And when some of those things are clearly physical reactions rather than psychological ones, too? It’s not rocket science that I’m going to be more unstable when my eating and sleeping and general living patterns are irregular.

Just an observation. I mean, I know that I currently don’t make a strong case for my own point at all, as my extreme rapid cycling as of late is actually typical of someone with BPD. I mean “extreme” in the sense of frequency/length of episodes and not at all in the sense of the behaviour that I am exhibiting. The most “extreme” I’ve been behaviour-wise lately was that Tuesday I cried a bit, and only the mental health nurse saw it the first time and nobody saw the second time.

At this very moment, I feel great, just so you know. At this very moment, I can’t imagine being depressed about anything. Don’t you love how even in the middle of rapid cycling, somehow I manage to firmly believe that whatever mood state I’m in is permanent?

I love Stephany’s post Who is a mental health advocate? Read it.

If you know where the title of my post came from without having to Google it, then I love you.

As I think I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had a few job interviews lately. Preparing for them has taken up much of my time. I’ve been pretty enthused about it. Okay, make that REALLY enthused. By which I mean that I stayed awake for over forty hours at one point last week. I’m not worried, though. Maybe I have ideas for a bunch of new projects and I REALLY want to go shopping and one night I purposely didn’t take my pills just ’cause I didn’t wanna, but I’ve been sleeping okay since that forty-hour stretch of wakefulness and I haven’t done anything stupid yet.

Since I recently spent eight years being a mentally ill university student, and also since I’m a human being who cares about other human beings, of course I’m deeply troubled by the Virginia Tech shootings. I don’t know if I’ll have any meaningful commentary on it in the future, and I don’t have any now except to say that my thoughts and prayers go out to those students and their families and friends.

In the past few days, I’ve rediscovered what it feels like to get a lot of sleep. I’ve always had trouble sleeping, and although I’ve had the type of insomnia where you keep waking up in the middle of the night and the type where you wake up really early in the morning although you’re tired, usually I have sleep-onset insomnia, which means that it takes me hours after I’ve gone to bed to actually fall asleep. When I was a small child, I usually wanted to get up around 4 a.m. because I felt ready to start my day at that point (my parents did not think this was a good idea), but at some point in elementary school, I started having problems falling asleep.

The insomnia comes and goes, and it’s been present again for the past few months, but I haven’t found it very bothersome, partly because I’ve had much worse trouble sleeping at other times, and partly because I know that my chronic exhaustion and hypersomnia while on Topamax and Zyprexa were a lot harder on me than mild to moderate insomnia is.

The past few days I’ve slept considerably later than usual and I really haven’t wanted to get out of bed. I know it was a holiday weekend, but still, I slept a lot. Usually, not wanting to get out of bed means I’m depressed, but my mood was fine, so I only wondered very briefly if I might be getting depressed before dismissing that thought. Then I wondered if maybe I was anxious about the job interviews I have coming up and trying to avoid preparing for them… but I have been preparing for them when I do get up, and I don’t feel unreasonably nervous about them. (I’m allowed to be a little bit nervous. They are job interviews, after all.) My interview prep and increased sleep have also left me with little time to blog lately.

My conclusion: I am just enjoying this rare joy of eight, nine, or ten hours of sleep per night to the fullest, because who knows when it’ll happen again?

Holy crap, this is a boring post. Maybe it’ll have a soporific effect on someone else, though, and do some good that way.