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.

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.

Heyyy, that is a great typo on the front page of the Breakdown site: “biopolar disorder.” Nice.

Often I think of my life as being described by (an extremely simplified version of) the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The level of chaos always tends to increase. Lately, it’s more like Newton’s First Law of Motion, where a body in motion tends to stay in motion and a body at rest tends to stay at rest. I either spend my time running around like a chicken with its head cut off or sitting around not doing much of anything. Today, it was not doing much of anything. It was yesterday, too. Ah, inertia. Ah, crappy similes.

The article Inch by Inch: Microactions by Mary LoVerde has a good overview:

Microactions are teeny tiny steps that propel us forward without threatening our sense of control. They get around our fears because we commit to something so little we could hardly be afraid and we’re guaranteed success. They’re much smaller than steps and often so ridiculous that we outfox our resistance to change.

Sometimes, when you do a microaction, it provides you with so much momentum that you actually find yourself achieving a goal, or at least taking a couple of steps toward doing so. The example in the article is of a woman whose microaction was to put on exercise clothes, and she felt silly standing around in exercise clothes and figured she might as well go for a walk. You can’t go into it expecting that to happen, though, because then you might be too freaked out to even take a microaction since you feel like you’d have to immediately follow it up with a bunch of other stuff you’re too tired to do, or you just do the microaction and feel disappointed in yourself for not accomplishing anything big. Sometimes you will accomplish something bigger, sometimes you’ll acclimatize yourself to a certain microaction so that it becomes part of your routine and it won’t take so much effort in the future, and sometimes you’ll only manage to do one tiny, little thing, and that might be the only thing that you do all day.

And sometimes that’s okay, because doing something is better than doing nothing.

A bit of looking around online shows me that Mary LoVerde is the author of Stop Screaming at the Microwave! : How to Connect Your Disconnected Life. I have always thought that was the best title for a self-help book that I’ve ever heard. I don’t know if I’d actually find the book itself helpful if I ever read it, but I can tell you that every time I see it in a store, I feel a bit better, because the title makes me giggle. Stop screaming at the microwave! Hee hee hee.

On a slightly related note, just in case you don’t understand how much of a dork I am, whenever I write a to-do list, the first item on it is always “Write to-do list.” That means there’s always something I can cross off right away, and it makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something.

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.

Hey, guy from the bus a month or two ago. I overheard you when you were saying, “It seems like everybody I grew up with is dying. One guy died of a drug overdose. Another friend of mine killed herself in jail in Ontario.”

I wanted to say, “You were friends with Ashley Smith? Man, I’m so sorry about what happened to her.”

But, of course, I didn’t say anything.

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.

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.