Would you like to become highly creative?
What would you say to being highly functional on 3 or 4 hours of sleep a night?
Salespeople: would you like the energy to triple your sales volume in a single day?
Would you like the inner push to exercise more, eat less, and not be hungry?

Come, join me in the happy land that I call mania.

The upside of being manic-depressive is that there are positive things about the mania. When I'm manic, I write. Prose, poetry, it's all there, just waiting for me to settle down and put it all down on paper. If I ever write the Great Canadian Novel, it will have to be done in fits and starts, during sporadic manic periods.

I clean. I organize. Every pair of spectacles at work [a mere 800 pairs] has been personally cleaned by me and I have re-organized the drawers of the dispensing tables. Oh - all this in between selling three times the largest amount of daily sales I've ever had, and ensuring that the store closes its month in the black. I would never have had the nerve before to suggest to a customer, having trouble choosing between four pair of glasses, that she buy all four pair, and certainly not the sales talk to convince her to do so.

I'm taking the dog on two-hour daily walks. We both enjoy it; there's a fallow field where he can run around off-leash, and a cemetary which I can explore - I love cemetaries. The thing about mania is that I barely eat. Or sleep. The exercise is not tiring me out or stimulating my appetite. Soon I'm going to crash, hard. In the meantime, I'm having fun and losing weight.

On top of all of the benefits listed above, how many of you would like to become verbally and sometimes physically abusive of your spouse? And remember almost none of it afterwards? Gone, like a mind-wipe, with only your shattered life-partner as evidence. Then there's the questionable pleasure of surges of deep, inexplicable rage, which you wish to - and sometimes do - let out at family members. You stop yourself almost immediately, but it does come out for a sentence or two. Bad. I've done the spending the family's money; that one's in the past. And remember, I'm well-medicated. What must it be like for the people who don't know what's wrong with them, or who can't afford the meds? And what must it be like for those people who have done something truly horrible in a manic rage and now need to pay the price for it for the rest of their lives?

Being bipolar sucks. My mother has it, but she wasn't diagnosed until a month after I left home. My wedding [we're talking first marriage here, folks] totally unhinged her, leaving her screaming at the wedding guests, and having her daughter arrive home from honeymooning to find her mother throwing all her possessions not yet at her new house out of her bedroom window onto the driveway. My father said that she needed to talk to the doctor or that he would leave. She went to the doctor, who put her in for a short-term stay at the mental health hospital, got her stabilized on meds, and sent her home. She's semi-stable. It still takes very little to set her off.

We think grandma - my mother's mother [whose maiden name, coincidentally, was Edith Jones!], was probably bipolar in the days before the condition officially existed. She did quite well, self-medicating on alcohol for most of her life, and raising my mother as well as any abusive drunk can do. I never saw this side of my grandma, and adored her.

I consider that the negatives far outweigh the positives. I wouldn't wish this disease on anyone, not even George W., whom even as a Canadian I feel a deep personal loathing for. But I do feel a duty to educate, and do so whenever possible. And thank you for listening!

Many of you here at LJ know that I'm bipolar, which seems to be the PC way of saying that I'm manic depressive. Personally, I far prefer manic depressive, as it's SO much more descriptive. The symptoms of the illness tend to recur most often when there are a lot of stressors in my life, as there have been for the last few months, and once in a horrible while, I am beset with the nasty happenstance of mixed states. 

The name gives it all away - I'm manic and depressed all at the same time. The mania usually manifests itself with severe anxiety, including those moments where I think that I'm either suffocating or having a heart attack. I am also ill-tempered and nasty during mixed states.  Also, I tend not to sleep very much. But instead of the usual manic euphoria and feelings of creativity, power, and sexual lust, I feel so depressed that I just want to stay under the covers in my bed for fucking ever, cry until there are no kleenexes left on the planet, and be tended to by loving [and probably slavishly devoted] caregivers. A lot of sleep usually factors into my wishes - about 18-20 hours a day would be nice, and the fact that I don't sleep at these times is probably a large reason why I long for so much nap time and so desperately!

After losing my temper at my daughter yesterday morning before school, I was careful about my temper for the rest of the day, and when I felt my wrath, for no reason, turning towards my husband last night, I explained to him that it would be far more sensible if he stayed downstairs to watch TV while I went upstairs and read a book, for being in the same room as me at the moment was utterly dangerous.  This morning, thinking that I was better, we dropped our elder daughter off at work and then went to run errands - by the end of errand number one I was already furious with him [not entirely sure why, looking back], and I managed to wreck the entire morning with my temper. We tried again to go out a couple of hours later and my temper was much improved, but both of us were on tenterhooks - John wondering if my temper was going to blow, and me wondering if my temper was going to blow - I honestly feel completely out of control sometimes when manic. Although I by no means wish to deny personal responsibility for my actions, sometimes it feels like an alien has taken over my mind, as when I am not in the grip of mania I would never want to hurt the people I end up hurting during my manic times. 

I hate it also when the mixed states are over, because then I find out that I've hurt people and need to apologize and make reparations. Of course it's the right thing to do, but even now that I'm on the best combination of medications that I've ever had, and feel sane for most of the time, sometimes my condition slips through the cracks and I lose it. It bugs the crap out of me that this is a disease that will never go away. I don't feel sorry for myself, just annoyed that I have it because it really sucks. It could be a lot worse, I know, but it's not exactly pleasant, and really puts a strain on some relationships. 

Note: I just explained to my teenaged son, who was playing Guitar Hero not 5 feet away, that I am in a terrible mood, and that I felt my temper towards him growing for no particular reason, and advised him to leave the room and stay away from me for the rest of the evening. And to tell his best friend, who's here for the weekend, the same advice. [I've known his best friend well for 11 years so feel no hesitation in confiding; he knows this family intimately.] It pains me to have to hand out this advice but I honestly don't want to lose the temper I feel rising inside of me. Time to read something old and familiar, I think. James Herriot, perhaps? Or continue the excellent Annie Proulx novel, "Accordion Crimes", that I'm now reading. Who knows? 

Mental illness sucks.

So my daughter, nine years old, wakes me up this morning as usual at 7:45. I moan and complain about it most mornings, but politely. This morning my temper was red-hot. I was NOT NICE. 

The word "bitch" could easily be applied to my attitude and behaviour towards my sweet little nine year old, and I don't generally act this way in the morning. The dog even curled himself around my head in an effort to appease me [he knows I love it] and I just felt cheated of head space. 

 When I finally dragged myself out of bed, bitching and moaning the whole way, I discovered that I hadn't taken my meds last night. I'm bipolar, [aka manic depressive], and need to take a complicated mixture of pills at bedtime each night to keep me sane. One night I missed and I turn into a tasmanian devil [was trying to say velociraptor but couldn't spell it]. 

Dear God, I hate being this dependant on pills to keep my mood out of the trash bin. Due to a lot of diligent work, I am taking a third of the meds that I was taking this time last year, but there is still obviously dependency, which will need to remain for the rest of my life.  I hate mental illness, especially my own. 

And most of all, I hate that I've upset my daughter. Apologies and extra-special love will be forthcoming.