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Thursday, April 23, 2015

me vs bipolar: round 5793 FIGHT!

I haven't been feeling well for a little while now. I spent about half of this month depressed. Possibly a little longer, because my sense of time is fuzzy right now. Today has been a really rough day due to my fucked up brain chemistry. I slept all morning on the couch because I just didn't have the energy to do anything. Then I was anxious this afternoon. Then evening hit and I found myself somewhere between wanting to scream incoherently in rage/frustration and sob with crushing grief.

I've taken some Ativan and as it has been kicking in, I can feel myself calming down. I still feel lousy but I'm no longer ready to throw things across the room. This is a significant improvement. I just want to curl up and go to sleep but I dread the idea of it. A part of me tells me it is wasted time which I should be spending on something productive. Today, I was so unfocused that I couldn't really do much of anything.

My sense of time has become so warped that I honestly thought today was the 30th and put that date on some checks I was about to mail out. I have picked them out of the mailbox and set them aside to send on the correct day. I was feeling better yesterday. I wasn't feeling great but I wasn't like this. I was landing more on the depressive side of the ledger but I was more functional too.

Now... I don't know what to do with myself. I feel awful between the frantic sense that I am doing everything wrong, the guilt that my disability is keeping me from contributing financially to our household, and this directionless, all consuming anger. The Ativan is making it a little less explosive but I still feel like I'm on the verge of falling to pieces. I tried, I really did try to get some writing done today but I couldn't get past the sense that my efforts to create a writing career is an exercise in futility and that no one really wants what I have to offer.

I am struggling with the sense that I am somehow doing this whole parenting thing wrong. Logically, I know that there is nothing I have done to cause my children to have autism (or be showing pretty much most of the hallmarks of ADHD). I fully understand, intellectually, that my only contribution to this situation is genetic and that Beloved and I are doing all the things we can to support and help them navigate the challenges that come from these diagnoses. My neurochemical issues, however, have me perseverating on the idea that I have some how caused my children's difficulties and that I am a bad parent because I get short tempered with them. I get stuck on this concept that I should be like I was about ten years ago when I was working at the daycare and pretty much able to cope with most of the challenges that came at me with the kids.

I get so angry that I am not that woman anymore. A part of me wants to cry and scream about how unfair it is. And then there is the part of me that angrily insists that wouldn't make a damn bit of a difference and there is no point to indulging in those kinds of things because they wouldn't contribute anything positive to the situation. Last night, I was real angry too. I was angry with everyone who has said that they didn't know 'how you do it' to everything that I've done thus far and am doing right now.

For me, there was never an option to just give up. It has always been something that I fought against. Because I am angry. I am so filled with rage that I could be incandescent. It's anger that pushes me forward just as much as it is passion. I'm angry with the injustice in the world. I'm angry with the cruelty that I see in it. I'm angry with the people who have hurt me and the ones who hurt the people I love. Oh, how I am furious with the ones who hurt the people I love. I am angry with the fact that I am disabled. I am angry with the fact that I can't do all the things that I would like to, even if disability wasn't a factor.

I get so angry that I feel like I am going to vomit. And then I pour it into pushing forward. I'm waging war on life and each time I am forced to take a tactical retreat, I get even more furious. People wonder where the darkness in my stories comes from. It comes from that rage that is bubbling beneath the surface. It comes from the dichotomy that I am forced into where I must always keep a calm and soothing, if not pleasant, facade for the world and this madness that drives me into a stammering, trembling mess just looking for a target to explode on.

I wish I could just put this down and be happy. Or at least not so livid. Right now, however, I am in no state for such things. It is just how this mixed episode is going. I knew that I was tending into a mixed episode when I went from being able to sleep through the night to waking up in the middle of the night and having a hard time falling asleep. I get like that as I move into and experience a hypomanic state. Why can my hypomania have me doing things like baking cookies? Why must it be anxiety, restlessness, and on the edge of fury?

Maybe it's somehow tied to my c-PTSD. I don't know. I don't claim to have the answers. And that's something else that makes me angry. Because not knowing what the fuck to do about this stuff aside from take pills and yammer at my therapist is making me upset because there has to be something I can do to make these symptoms easier to manage.

I don't know. I'm tired. My brain is just running full tilt. And I feel like I should be breaking shit right now. Totally not the right headspace for much of anything, unfortunately.

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