Blogging From the Border
My life with Bipolar I and Borderline Personality Disorder
What’s Going On In My Life?
My ex-girlfriend sent me a text last week saying that I needed to blog more so that she could know what’s going on in my life.
Some might say it’s crazy that this woman is still my best friend in the whole world, but hell, the circumstances surrounding our relationship have been crazy since the day I walked through her front door frantically asking to use her bathroom in the same breath I had used to introduce myself.
I’ve written about the relationship. I’ve written about the good times and the bad. I’ve written about the pain and the heartache. None of that is the point of this post.
My point is just to say (one more time) that I’m going to try to post about my life more regularly. For you guys. For her. For me.
Rough Therapy, Part 2
Ok, trying to pick up where I left off in the last post…
A week ago, on Tuesday, I went to therapy. I knew it was going to be unpleasant, and for the first time in a very long time, I truly did not want to go to therapy. I knew she was going to be disappointed in me.
I even told her at the beginning of the session that I hadn’t wanted to come that day. She asked me if I knew why. I told her that I just didn’t feel like it. She said it was understandable sometimes to just not want to dig into your feelings.
I told her that I hadn’t had any Ritalin since what I took the previous Tuesday. I know she would have praised me for that, but before she had a chance, I said that the pain pills and muscle relaxers were an entirely different story.
I told her that I was taking them 3 at a time, and that the day before, I had taken 6 of each in less than 3 hours. She said, “Kristy!” in that tone that said she was both surprised and disappointed.
I’ve never seen her so frustrated with me, and believe me, I’ve given her some reasons to be frustrated with me over the years. It might have been a little different if it hadn’t been the third week in a row we had talked about substance abuse, and if it hadn’t been so close to the marijuana incident, and all the lying I had done about smoking. But I knew that all of that was swirled up in her responses to me that day. She was exasperated with me, and she had every right and reason to be.
A couple of times, her tone was even bordering on what seemed to me to be unprofessional – like this was more of a personal conversation than a therapist/client conversation. The tone was a mix of sarcastic and condescending. I’ve never heard that tone in her voice before. I even asked her what was with the tone. She said, “Oh, I don’t know,” in a tone that said to me that she knew damn well what her tone was and that it was very deliberate. It got my attention.
I’ve said before that my therapist rarely tells me what to do. I’m supposed to come up with the answers myself, and I typically do. Sometimes I’ll say something like, “So you’re saying that I should,” and then fill in whatever it is I think is the healthy decision in whatever situation we’re discussing. She’ll usually say, “Yes, that’s what I’m saying.” It’s how I get her to “tell me what to do” without her really telling me what to do. Tuesday, I said, “So you’re saying that I…” And that’s as far as I got before she jumped in with, “That you WILL stop taking the pills!” She caught me off guard with that. I said, “Oh… I ‘will,’ not I ‘should?’” She confirmed that she unquestionably meant “will.”
She asked me what DBT says about drugs. I said that avoiding mood altering drugs was part of emotion regulation. She nodded and said that I wasn’t using the tools I had in order to maintain stability.
I told her that my mom won’t let anyone else get her pain pills for her because she doesn’t trust anyone but me. She trusts me not to take them, and I’m the one who’s been stealing them from her. I told her I felt horrible. She told me to be the honest person that I was at my core. I asked her she really believed that’s who I was, since I certainly hadn’t been that person lately. She assured me that she believed that I am, and want to be, an honest person, or I wouldn’t feel so bad about what I’d done.
I said that I could get the pills I had taken out of my room, but that I still had to get them for my mom when she needed them. She told me to remember that I’m a nurse when I get Mom’s meds, and to be a professional, as if I were at work. I reminded her that I had stolen even more drugs from work than I had from my mother. She closed her eyes and sighed and said that she knew, but that she was encouraging me to take the opportunity to stop that behavior now.
She said that on some level, I wanted to stop, or else I wouldn’t have brought the whole thing up to her. I agreed, and told her that there was no way I could have come in that day and talked about anything else. She said that was good.
Our time was ending and I told her that I really liked it better when she was happy with me and what I was doing. She said, “Surely you couldn’t have expected me to be at all happy with you right now. I wouldn’t be doing my job.” I said I knew… that I liked it better when I was doing things that would make her happy. She hugged me goodbye, then looked me dead in the eyes and said, “Then please stop.”
How could I not stop after that?
My head was spinning for the rest of the day. I knew there was no way I could take even one more pill because I didn’t want to ever experience her being that upset with me again. Not ever. I felt so horrible about myself that I wanted to cut, but I knew that would just be one more thing that disappointed her and proved that I wasn’t using the skills that she has worked so hard to help me develop.
The next three days were torture. I felt like I was coming out of my skin. I was in so much pain, physically and psychologically, that I didn’t know how I was going to survive it. I was so depressed that all I could think about was dying. My mother kept asking me if I was taking my meds.
Finally on Friday afternoon I started leveling out a bit. I noticed that I wasn’t constantly thinking about suicide. Saturday felt even more level.
So, as of today, it’s been 6 days since I’ve taken any drugs, prescription or non-prescription, that I’m not supposed to be taking. I’ve been taking my prescribed medications as prescribed by my psychiatrist… nothing more, nothing less.
Part of me still wants to be fucked up, but most of me is glad to finally be clean. Staying clean is going to be a long, hard road, but at least I’m a few steps along it. And I feel good about seeing my therapist tomorrow. That may be the best thing of all.
Rough Therapy, pt 1
So much has happened since the last time I wrote a post, I figured it was time to catch you guys up.
Years ago, when I first started seeing my therapist, when I used an unhealthy coping mechanism like drinking or cutting, she’d say, “I’m sorry to hear that.” For a while, she said it a lot. One day I told her that my goal for the week was to not do anything that was going to make her say, “I’m sorry to hear that.”
She asked me what it was about those words that I didn’t like. I told her that I knew she was disappointed in me when she said it, and that there was something about the phrase that just felt bad. She assured me that she didn’t mean to convey anything other than that she was sorry that I was in a bad enough place that I saw no other options than to drink or cut, but that she would try not to use the phrase since it made me feel bad. For years I didn’t hear that phrase from her.
During my first therapy session after Thanksgiving, she asked me what I did for Thanksgiving. I told her that I got drunk. She looked at me, and in a tone that told me that she was saying it with intention, said, “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Damn. No sympathy that I was hurting badly enough that I felt that I needed to drink, just disappointment that I had chosen a dysfunctional coping mechanism over the healthy coping skills I have learned with DBT. I hate disappointing her. I told her that I was considering going to some AA meetings. She said, “I like that idea. I like it a lot.” So I went to AA, which I wrote about in my last post.
I’ve also written a post about why taking Ritalin is a very bad idea for me. But in spite of what I knew, I was still taking Ritalin. I had stopped taking it for about three weeks after my psychiatrist told me to stop taking it, but I missed the “mini-mania” it gave me, so I started taking it again. Once I started going to AA and was claiming to be sober, I realized that I had to give up the Ritalin too. Problem was, I didn’t want to. I knew I needed to talk to my therapist about it, and I knew that once I talked to her, my conscience wouldn’t let me take anymore Ritalin. I decided that I would stop, but not until after I talked to my therapist. So I still had almost a week before I was going to have to stop, so, like the addict I am, I decided to get in as much Ritalin as I could in the meantime.
Instead of taking one twice a day like I had been, I started taking one four or five times a day. I was seriously wired, and I was afraid my mom would notice. So to bring myself down a little bit, I started sneaking pain pills and muscle relaxers from my mom’s pills. She has a huge stash, and I get the pills for her when she needs them, so there was very little chance of her noticing any of them missing.
Tuesday mornings I have a 7 am Weight Watchers meeting and then therapy at 8:30. That Tuesday morning, which was one week after I told her that I drank, I took a Ritalin before I left for my Weight Watchers meeting, and then another when I was on my way to therapy.
We were 5 minutes till the end of our session before I worked up the nerve to bring up the Ritalin. It was also about the time it started really kicking in and I couldn’t sit still to save my life. We went about 35 minutes over talking about why Ritalin was such a bad idea for me. There really wasn’t anything she said that I didn’t know, but I needed to hear it again, and I needed to hear it from her. She was pretty serious about the whole thing. She wanted me to know that this was a big deal. I told her that I had to stop now, because there was no way I could enjoy it anymore after the last half hour or so. What I didn’t tell her during that session was that I’d also been taking the pain pills and muscle relaxers.
I did take one more dose of Ritalin that afternoon, but I poured them into the trash bin the next morning. I went to my 5 am AA meeting, told them that I’d been using stimulants, and got a new desire chip. I had every intention of staying off pills, but I didn’t even reach the end of the day before I was swallowing more pain pills and muscle relaxers.
I was so disappointed in myself for not even being able to stay clean for an entire day. I hated myself. So I took more pills. I knew I was going to have to talk to my therapist about these pills too. Again, I knew that after I talked to her, I was going to have to stop taking them. And so again, on some level of consciousness, I decided to take as many as I could without overdosing. I was taking three pain pills and three muscle relaxers at a time, and taking them three or four times a day. I spent that week as a zombie, passing the lethargy off to my mother as Ritalin withdrawal.
Tuesday came, and I went to therapy. I always look forward to seeing my therapist, but on Tuesday, I really didn’t want to face her. I knew that it was going to be an unpleasant session.
It turned out to be just about the most unpleasant therapy session I’ve ever had with her. I’m going to tell you guys all about it, but for the moment, I’ve lost my focus to write. So I’m going to post what I’ve got for now, and try to finish up in the morning.
Back to AA
I am a Bipolar/Borderline lesbian atheist. I’m also an alcoholic/addict. So where the fuck do I fit in?
As those of you who actually read my blog or follow me on Twitter know that I’m pretty much stuck at home with my mom pretty much all day every day.
Years ago, I went to AA meetings regularly. There was a time shortly after I stopped drinking (the first or second time) that I went to thirteen meetings a week. I lived and breathed the AA program.
I was never particularly comfortable with the religious aspect of AA. Yes, they say it’s a spiritual, not religious, program. Yes, they say your higher power can be anything. But the word they use over and over is “God.” The word “God” is in the steps, in the literature, in the slogans, in the prayers at the beginning and end of each meeting. “God” is everywhere in AA.
I haven’t always called myself an atheist, but I’ve never bought the concept of god. My reasoning isn’t important to this post, and I’m not trying to offend anyone or change anyone’s religious beliefs. I respect your right to believe in what works for you. All I ask is that you also respect my beliefs in return.
Anyway… so I’ve never been real comfortable with the religious component of AA. It’s one of the main reasons I stopped going to meetings. I haven’t gone for over 10 years. No, I haven’t stayed sober all that time. I tried… sort of… sometimes… but I basically just said, “Fuck it,” and drank when I wanted to.
With the stress I’ve been under lately taking care of Mom, I’ve wanted to drink or use… anything to change the way I’ve been feeling. That’s why I started smoking pot again – to change the way I felt. But, as most of you know, that ended up with me in the emergency room in a severe manic episode. So that wasn’t going to work.
For the last month, since I stopped smoking pot, I’ve wanted to drink. I just wanted to get a few hours relief from the stress, consequences of drinking be damned. I’m usually a funny drunk. I can do a stand-up routine that rivals the best amateur comedians out there when I’m good and buzzed. But then I spend the next three days wanting to kill myself. Over the years, I have self-harmed many times while drinking. I’ve had a shotgun in my mouth. I’ve gone to sleep in the snow hoping to freeze to death. Drinking does bad things to me.
Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve been thinking about going to some kind of support group to get out of the house and be around some other human beings besides just my mother. It’s hard for me to go someplace new for the first time. I plan to go, but then I get anxious to the point of getting sick, and I don’t go. So I was actually considering going to the place I used to feel mostly comfortable: AA. I swore I’d never go back to another 12-Step group because of the god thing. I needed something, but I wasn’t sure I was desperate enough to go back to AA.
Then Thanksgiving happened. I was very stressed. I somehow ended up being in charge of getting all the food ready, and I had to take care of Mom. By the time my sister arrived, I was really on edge. She asked me if I needed to talk. I said, “No. I need to drink.” And I did. I didn’t think I really drank that much at the time, but when my therapist asked me to count how many drinks I’d had, I had to guess somewhere between 10 and 12. She seemed to think that was more than just a little.
I got lucky with this drunk. I drank without the severe consequences that I usually have. I had fun, I got a break from the stress, and I didn’t spend the next three days in a suicidal depression. But it was, in the words my therapist has to use too often, risky behavior. With my current level of stress and the difficulty I’ve had lately regulating my moods, the odds of not having negative consequences from drinking were very slim. I just got lucky.
I told my therapist yesterday that I thought about going to an AA meeting. She said that she really liked that idea. She knows how to play me… not in a bad way. Saying, “That’s a good idea,” and “I like that idea,” might not sound much different to most people, but from her, it means a world of difference to me. And she knows it. She knows I’ll want to do something that she’s said she likes.
So, yeah, I went to an AA meeting this morning. I was anxious, but I went. I stayed. And I even talked. It was nice to be around some people. I recognized a few people from when I went to that meeting years ago. Everyone told me that they hoped I came back. I think I will.
The god stuff…well, I’ll deal with it.
The Disaster at Home – Part 1
The last several days have just been one big disaster.
When my nephew got home from work on Monday, my mom called him over to talk to him about the mushrooms. When she told him that she knew that he was growing them, he just shrugged and said, “OK.” She said that she was disappointed that he would do something illegal in her house, and he said that it is not actually illegal to grow mushrooms in Oklahoma, that they are only illegal once they have been picked. From what I found online in the quick search I did, he may indeed be right about that.
He said that he intended to use the money he was going to make on them to give himself a better life: to pay for school, to pay his car insurance, to pay for a nice place to live. Thing is, my mom is willing to pay for school for him, and to pay his car insurance until he gets on his feet. He’s working, and making decent money from his job. I’ve lived on less than what he’s making now. But he thinks it’s better to sell drugs to make the money to pay for it himself than earn money the honest way and let Mom help him with the things he can’t afford yet. He says he is doing honest work because it takes a lot of time and effort to grow mushrooms properly. It was unbelievable. He just stood there rationalizing and justifying his behavior, and my mom was letting him get away with it.
This part of the talk didn’t take very long because he had to leave to pick up his fiancé. While he was gone, my mom called my sister, and she called my dad. They were both supposed to come over, but Dad ended up not being able to come, so just my sister showed up. The three of us talked about what we needed to say to him when he came home.
We decided that the bottom line was that the rule when he moved in here was no drugs in the house, so the drugs had to go, and it was his choice whether or not he and the fiancé went with them. The talk started up again when my nephew got home with his fiancé, and this is when it all got very ugly.
The fiancé was taking a shower, so at first it was just the women and the nephew talking. Nobody seemed to want to start the conversation, so my sister finally spoke up. She told him that we had all agreed that the drugs needed to go, whether he went with them or not. His response was that he didn’t have any drugs. A little surprised, we said that he had pot and mushrooms. He agreed, but insisted that he didn’t have drugs. He said he had plants. He had pot that someone else had grown, and he had mushrooms that he was cultivating under specific conditions. He said he was simply gardening indoors. I was again shocked at his ability to rationalize.
We pointed out that they might be plants, but those plants were not only drugs, but they were also illegal drugs. The mushrooms might not be illegal at the stage they are in, but once they are fully grown and harvested, they will be. He also has intent to sell. His rationale for that was to say that he wasn’t going to sell them out of the house. He said that no one would be coming to the house to buy, because he would be going to them. That was just supposed to make it okay. We were supposed to be okay with him selling drugs because he wasn’t planning on bringing customers to the house.
We pointed out that he could get caught and if he did, he would probably go to jail. He said that he was willing to take that risk to have a good life rather than settling for a mediocre life. He said he was not going to stop no matter what we said.
At about this point, his fiancé came out to join the conversation. She asked what was going on, and my nephew gave her a brief update. She said that if she was forced to get rid of the mushroom lab, she would have to be compensated for the money she had spent on it. My jaw dropped. Seriously? She wanted us to pay her back for the things she bought and brought into our house, where she is living rent-free, without permission or regard for anyone’s safety. Unbelievable.
That’s when I started to get angry. I said that I wanted everything having to do with pot and mushrooms gone. I said I didn’t want to be around it at all. I didn’t want anything in the house or anywhere near me. I wasn’t raging, but I was pretty angry, and my voice was sharp and it was raised.
They got up and went to the backyard. My mom, my sister, and I talked about what our next step needed to be. We agreed that since my nephew and his fiancé were unwilling to get rid of the mushrooms and pot, that they needed to move out as soon as possible. My sister went to get them from outside so we could tell them that.
My nephew seemed very upset that we were going to make him move out before he was ready. We tried to tell him that he knew the options and had made his own choice; that we were just enforcing the rules. He asked if they could at least finish this crop of mushrooms so they would have the money to move out. We said no. Again I said that everything had to go. Then the fiancé laughed at me.
She laughed at me. I don’t take well to being laughed at. I asked her if she thought what I said was funny. She said yes, because it was “just so random.” I blew. I flew into a full-blown rage and started yelling at her that she had a horrible attitude, and that she needed to have more respect for the adults in the house. I stood up, and my nephew stood up and got between us. I kept yelling at the fiancé, and then my nephew started screaming and got just inches from my face. I put my hands on his chest and pushed him away. He came closer again, still screaming, and I pushed him again.
I haven’t had a full-blown rage like that in several years. I’ve come close, but I haven’t gotten to the point where I put my hands on someone and knocked things over for quite some time. It feels horrible. The adrenaline is overwhelming, and I am completely out of control. I can’t regulate my behaviors or my words. It’s absolutely horrible, and there’s absolutely nothing I can do to stop it.
After I pushed him, he and his fiancé walked out the front door, and I went out the back door. I knocked over the trashcan and a chair, and I paced the driveway for a while until I calmed down enough to call my therapist. She got me calmed down enough to go back inside to take care of Mom so we could go to bed and get some sleep. She also said she would try to rearrange some things the next day so she could get me in for an appointment.
My sister went home. My nephew and his fiancé came home and went to their room, and Mom and I went to bed.
It was a very, very long day, and lots has happened since then, but let me finally post this part, and then I’ll start working on the next part. Hopefully there’s less drama between now and then, but, considering what’s going on today, I’m certain that there is plenty more drama in store.
There’s Drama in the House
I spent most of the day yesterday trying to write a blog post with no success. I hope that today’s writing (and the day in general) will go more smoothly.
I’ve been really emotional the last couple of days. I have been irritable, angry, and agitated. Part of it is the stress of being a 24/7 caregiver for my mom. She’s not as hard to take care of as she was before she went to the rehab center, but she still requires someone close by 24 hours a day.
Taking care of Mom is my job, literally. I quit my full-time job that earned a paycheck so that I could take care of Mom full time. It’s a lot different taking care of one person 24 hours a day than it is to take care of 5 people for 12 hours 3 nights a week. I don’t mind doing the work it takes to care for her, it’s the fact that I have such a small amount of time to myself. My “me” time is very important to my mental health. I am irritable without it. I need time to just be by myself without having to jump when she calls. Yet I feel guilty asking for help because it’s my job. She is supporting me financially so that I can do this for her.
While Mom was in the rehab facility for the past two months, it was just my nephew, his fiancé, and me living here. The three of us got along pretty well, and we kept the house kind of clean, but it would not have been up to my mom’s standards by any stretch of the imagination. The dishes got done, but sometimes they sat in the sink for a couple of days. The floor got swept and mopped, but not until the dog hair was floating around in the corners.
A very clean house is important to Mom, and now that she’s home, I’ve gone back to keeping on top of cleaning things as soon as I get them dirty. My nephew and his fiancé have not. Mom can’t stand the mess, so I end up cleaning it up, and I get resentful that I’m cleaning up two more people’s messes when I already have to clean up after Mom and myself.
They claim that they are busy, and that’s why they have let things slide. It’s true that they are both working full time, but plenty of people work full time and still manage to clean up after themselves. The reason they are “too busy” is that they are growing psychedelic mushrooms in their closet and it takes a lot of time to make sure the conditions are optimal for their growth. So drugs are getting in the way of them doing their share of work around the house.
They also smoke a lot of pot, and in spite of being asked not to smoke in the house, they continue to smoke in their bedroom and in their bathroom. Mom told them once that either they could live here or they could smoke where they live, but not both. In other words, “don’t smoke in the house if you plan to continue living here.”
They went out to their car to smoke for a long time, and it was really my fault that they started smoking in the house again. Mom was still in the rehab center when I decided to start smoking pot again, and since all three of us were smoking and we were the only ones in the house, we were all smoking inside. Mom knew we were all smoking, and only asked that we smoke outside. They never went back to smoking outside, even after Mom came home. My pot smoking experiment went horribly wrong and ended up with a trip to the Crisis Center in the back of a police car, so I stopped smoking entirely.
My nephew and his fiancé were angry with me for the manic/psychotic episode that “forced” them to call the paramedics for me. Police come with the paramedics when it’s a behavioral call, and they were worried that they were going to get busted for their drug lab and for the amount of pot they had in the house. They were less concerned about my safety or well-being then they were about getting in trouble for, and losing, their drugs. They talked to me as if I had behaved that way on purpose and that I was being inconsiderate to them.
Sure. I did it on purpose. It’s called an illness for a reason, jerks. Yes, it was driven by my own drug use, but if I had known what was going to happen to me, I certainly would have never picked up the pipe in the first place.
So we’re back to the mushrooms. My nephew was excited about me tripping with him just like he was excited about me smoking pot with him. I already wrote about my thought process and about talking to my therapist about the whole thing last week, so I won’t go into all that again, but the bottom line is that I came to the conclusion that it would be a very, very bad idea for me to use mushrooms.
It was about the time that Mom broke her leg that they started growing the mushrooms, so they have managed to keep it a secret from her without much effort. I’ve enabled them on keeping the secret by not telling Mom, but the more time that passes, and the more I thought about it, the more I felt very deeply that Mom needed to know what was going on in her house.
The fact is that there are multiple illegal drugs in my mother’s house, and one of them is being grown in large amounts. I don’t know too much about the law in regards to drugs, but I’m sure that the cultivation of an illegal drug has to be worse than simple possession. They also have intent to sell. And I imagine that, being the homeowner, Mom could get in a lot of trouble if the mushrooms were discovered, whether she knew about them or not.
Since she could be seriously affected by the situation, I truly believed that she needed to know the truth, but I was afraid that my nephew would be mad at me for telling her. One of the reasons he doesn’t speak to his mother, my sister, is that she told our father about his marijuana use. I have never seen him angrier than he was about that. He and I have always been close, and he has always confided in me about things he doesn’t tell other people. I feel like a special person in his life, and I am so afraid of losing that. My gut, my conscience, my heart, and my self-esteem were all fighting about what to do. I was troubled, and Mom could tell. Moms can always tell.
I spent several days thinking, weighing my options, and asking for advice from friends. I had decided to wait and talk to my therapist about it before I decided what to do, but I was still troubled, and Mom could tell. Moms can always tell.
She kept asking me what was wrong, and I finally told her that I had something she should know about my nephew, but that I was afraid he’d be mad and never speak to me again if I told her. She said that we’d deal with that part later, and that I should tell her. So I told her.
She didn’t seem as surprised or angry as I expected her to be, but she was definitely disappointed. She was actually more disappointed that he has been lying to her than she was about him growing the mushrooms in the first place. She said she would try to find a way to “find out” for herself so that we could keep me out of it and focus on the real issue, which was the fact that he is growing mushrooms. She decided that she would tell him that the bug man came to spray and that he discovered the setup in the closet.
I don’t like the fact that she has to lie to him to keep him from being angry with me, but I’m also not going to argue with it. Someday it will be the right time to tell him that I’m the one who told.
So today is the day that the bug man “came.” My nephew will be home in less than an hour, and Mom is going to talk to him then. I have no idea how this is going to go. No idea at all. All I know is that I’m getting very anxious.
I’ll keep you all posted about how it goes.
Sleep and Mania
Today is the 6th day since I stopped taking Ritalin and increased my dosages of Lamictal and Risperdal. I’m definitely feeling better. I’m more stable, I’m sleeping more hours (although still not well), and I haven’t thought about suicide in a couple of days, even with the increased stress of bringing Mom home. Any type of stress is typically a trigger that throws me into suicidal ideation.
During the couple of weeks after my giant manic/psychotic episode, I was only sleeping three hours a night, but was wide awake when I woke up, and I was awake and functional for the rest of the day without really feeling the need for a nap. I knew I needed sleep, and I could tell by the instability of my moods that the lack of sleep was affecting me, but I never really felt tired. Occasionally I would knock myself out with extra Risperdal and muscle relaxers (which are my mother’s, not mine), but that was the only way I could nap.
For the last few nights, I’ve been sleeping about five hours a night, but suddenly am I feel tired during the day. I feel like I need a nap, but a nap is not really an option because I have to be awake to help Mom when she needs something.
Being tired is one thing that nearly always causes great instability in my moods. But even with an increase in feeling tired, and an increase in my stress level due to taking care of Mom, the shifts in my moods have actually decreased. I still get irritable, but I don’t have the terrible agitation that I had during the previous couple of weeks, and I don’t have the plunges into the numbing but torturous depression.
One of the symptoms of mania is a decreased need for sleep. I never thought of it as having a decreased need for sleep, as I knew I needed more sleep when I was only getting three hours a night. However, after I noticed the differences in daytime sleepiness and the increased stability of my moods after getting more hours of sleep, I’m beginning to consider the possibility that I was in a dysphoric hypomania during those two weeks. I guess that would make sense, considering that I was coming off a huge full-blown psychotic manic episode, that it would continue for a while in a milder state after the initial dose of Haldol from the ER wore off.
I’m pretty sure I’ve said this a few times already, but the more I read about Bipolar Disorder, the more I see how it fits for me.
Addiction
There was more to yesterday’s therapy session than I was able to write about last night because anything and everything was distracting me, so I am trying this again this morning.
The major themes of the session were honesty and addiction. For the most part, it was honesty about my addictions. I mentioned in my last post that my psychiatrist took me off my Ritalin on Monday. My therapist was glad that he did that. In fact, she said last week that she thought Ritalin wasn’t the best idea for me. She thought it might be increasing my agitation and irritability. She’s never believed my inattention, distractibility, and other symptoms that could be attributed to ADD were actually due to ADD.
I never told her until yesterday how I actually got the prescription for Ritalin, and I’ve been taking it since I changed family doctors about 3 years ago. When I changed doctors, I had to give my new doctor a list of my current medications, and I included Ritalin on that list even though I’d never been diagnosed with ADD and had never before had a prescription for Ritalin or any other ADD med. Just because I’d never had a prescription doesn’t mean I never tried it. My ex used to take Ritalin, and she shared with me on occasion. I liked it. It gave me energy, helped me stay awake for night shifts, and it did help me stay focused. Mostly I liked the energy it gave me. I liked having the ability to get things done. So I lied to my new doctor to get a prescription for a controlled substance that I didn’t need but really wanted to have.
When I started seeing the new psychiatrist, he wasn’t exactly thrilled that I was taking Ritalin. He said that he wouldn’t tell me I couldn’t have it, but that I’d have to get it from the doctor who was already prescribing it because he wouldn’t write me a prescription for it. That was no problem; I already had my family doctor convinced that I was ADD. The psychiatrist did say that he wanted me to decrease my dosage from 20 mg twice a day to 5 mg twice a day in order to decrease my agitation and anxiety. Since I was getting my prescription from a different doctor anyway, I never decreased my dosage, but I told the psychiatrist I was. So I was lying to everybody to get the drug I wanted.
When my therapist said last week that I shouldn’t be on Ritalin, and my psychiatrist told me on Monday to stop taking it, I decided to finally follow directions. I took my last dose of Ritalin on Monday morning. My agitation and anxiety levels were still high on Monday. They were slightly lower on Tuesday, and even lower on Wednesday. It’s too early to tell yet how today is going to end up since the agitation usually hits in the afternoons. Maybe the Ritalin really was causing some of my agitation. However, at the same time I stopped my Ritalin, I increased my dosages of Lamictal and Risperdal, so it could be that instead. Or it could be the combination of changing all three of those meds. With that many changes at once, there’s no way I can know for sure.
In any case, I do feel better since I stopped taking Ritalin. I miss the energy it gave me, but is the extra energy worth the possibility that the Ritalin was contributing to my agitation? I can find natural ways to increase my energy level, but the agitation is much less manageable. If I’m really honest with myself, I have to admit that I’ve actually been more productive in the mornings since I stopped the Ritalin than I was before. I may not quite have the energy, but I have been getting the things done that I want to do.
I told my therapist the truth for the first time about my Ritalin usage, which also meant that I had to be honest with myself about it for the first time. If Ritalin was a medication that I truly needed, I wouldn’t have had to lie.
There is one more thing that my therapist and I talked about yesterday, and it might be the biggest one. I asked her if I had told her that my nephew and his fiancé were growing mushrooms at the house. I mean psilocybin mushrooms: psychedelic mushrooms. She said that I had mentioned it a couple of months ago, but yesterday we talked more about it.
I told her that my nephew told me the shrooms are almost ready and that it was going to be hard for me when they were. She asked why. I told her that my nephew really wants me to trip with him. He’s laid off a little on telling me that I can still smoke a little weed after I told him about the research I had done and that I had concluded that my brain will never play nice with pot. But he keeps telling me how much I will love tripping on shrooms, and how excited he is for me to try it.
I told her that he asked me if I was going to do research on how shrooms would affect my brain, and that I said, “Not until after I try it.”
She looked very surprised when I said that. She said, “After what just happened to you, I’m really surprised you’re even considering it.” She pulled a book about psychotropic drugs from the shelf, flipped to a page about psilocybin (the active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms), and started reading some facts to me.
Psilocybin causes both visual and auditory hallucinations. It also causes changes in perception, peculiar thoughts, increased anxiety, and depersonalization (the sense of not being real). Psilocybin can cause mood lability, instability in the sense of self, and unusual or paranoid thoughts. Psilocybin can cause psychotic episodes in people who are vulnerable to them. One psilocybin trip can cause permanent changes in personality. Long-term effects of psilocybin on mental health are similar to the long-term effects of LSD.
It’s true that there are people who have wonderful experiences on a mushroom trip, but every substance I’ve ever used has caused nothing but problems for me, either immediately or eventually. I already have labile moods, and unstable sense of self, and occasional paranoid thoughts. I already have high anxiety. I just experienced some psychotic symptoms, if not a full-blown psychotic break using marijuana, so I’m clearly susceptible to psychotic episodes. During that episode, I had visual and auditory hallucinations, changes in my perception, and a sense of depersonalization. I experienced all of those things that are supposed to make shrooms pleasant for people, and they were horrible for me. It was one of the most horrible things I have ever experienced. Why would I even be considering trying it? Why the hell was there a part of me trying to convince myself that those things wouldn’t happen to me…again? That is insanity.
I asked her, “So, you’re saying you would be really disappointed in me if I did that?”
She gave me the hardest look I’ve ever seen her give me and said very firmly, “I would be disappointed. I’d be horrified, and I’d be really pissed off. So don’t do it. Absolutely don’t do it.”
In the 12 years I’ve been seeing her, she’s only told me what to do twice. She typically points out reasons why something would be a good or bad idea, but she very, very rarely flat out tells me what to do, even when I try to get her to. Both times she has done it, she was very serious, and both times she has done it, it scared me back into reality. I don’t want to disappoint her. I don’t want her to be mad at me. But even more, I don’t want to go through again what I went through two weeks ago.
I have to tell my nephew that I can’t and won’t be “shrooming” with him. And I have to stay strong when he tries to get me to do it anyway.
Bottom line is that I am an addict through and through. Because of my addiction, I have lied and cheated, and I’ve certainly stolen in order to get my high. I do things that have bad consequences for my physical and mental health without considering that some of those consequences could be devastating for me.
That’s just crazy. No, that’s addiction.
Honesty is Tough
I had a good, although occasionally uncomfortable, therapy session today. I came clean about some things that I’ve been less than honest about, and we talked a lot about my addictive tendencies.
First, she asked me how my appointment with my psychiatrist had gone. I told her that he was calling the episode “cannabis induced acute psychosis,” that he took me off my Ritalin, and that he increased my Lamictal and Risperdal. I’ll get into more detail about the Ritalin in another post; there’s plenty still to talk about in this one.
She still thinks the episode was more manic with psychotic features than a true psychotic episode, and she did get a lot more detail about it than I was able to tell my psychiatrist in the time we had, but since I can’t remember all that much of it, I guess none of us will ever really know for sure. The bottom line, I guess, is that no matter what we call it I never want to go through it again.
I admitted to her that I had been smoking pot throughout the manic/psychotic episode, even though I had told her last week that I hadn’t been. She honestly didn’t seem very surprised. But when I said something about the writing I had been doing while I was high, she did look surprised and asked, “Oh, you were high when you did that?”
I said, “Yeah, did I forget to mention that last week?”
She nodded, “You did forget to mention that.”
I told her that yes, I was high each and every time I wrote in that manic fashion that I had described to her.
She seemed a little disappointed in me. She didn’t seem so much disappointed by the fact that I had been high when I did the writing, but by the fact that we had talked about the writing and the manic aspects of it a couple of times, and I had never mentioned that marijuana was involved.
Since it was true confession day, I asked her if she remembered a session a little over a month ago when she told me that I seemed distracted. She did. I told her that the reason I was distracted was that I had just started smoking pot again and I was sitting there fighting off the part of me that knew I needed to tell her.
She nodded again, sighed, and said that if I had told her – if she had known I had been getting high – we might have been able to prevent the episode that ended with a trip to the ER, a shot of Haldol, and a trip to the Crisis Center. She said that she had seen the signs that something was going wrong, and that if she had known about the marijuana, she would have known why and warned me about what could possibly happen.
I told her that I knew what she would have said and that was why I hadn’t told her. I didn’t want to hear rational thinking; I just wanted to get high. Again, she looked a little disappointed. I really hate when she’s disappointed in me.
We moved off the topic of marijuana and she asked me how I had done after we had talked on the phone on Sunday. I said that talking to her had really helped, and then I realized I had another confession to make. When I called her I told her that my urge to cut was strong enough that I had actually gone looking for something to cut with and that’s when I decided to call. That wasn’t exactly the truth. The truth was that I already had a razor blade in my hands and that it was my Twitter friends who encouraged me to put the razor blade away and to call her.
She nodded slowly and just looked at me for a few seconds before she said, “It’s still hard for you to be honest with me, isn’t it?” It wasn’t really a question. And that’s when I started squirming.
The feeling I had when she said that is hard for me to put a name on. It wasn’t shame, it was more regret and disappointment in myself. I could hardly disagree with her statement though; it was true. It is still hard for me to be honest with her sometimes. Honesty is so important in our relationship, but there are times I’ve lied because I don’t want to disappoint her with what I’ve done. The problem with that is that when I end up telling her the truth, which I always eventually do, she’s disappointed that I lied to her. And rightfully so. How is she supposed to do her job if I’m not honest with her? How can she truly help me if I’m lying?
Honesty has never been my strong suit. I’m a liar, and a creative one at that. I’m a thousand times better than I used to be, but I still have my moments, and I sure have had my share of them lately. That’s something that’s hard to see about myself.
Then we talked about how my moods have been shifting so much between morning and afternoon. In spite of my insomnia, my mornings have been very productive with writing, photography, and yoga. I feel relatively balanced, centered, and mindful in the mornings. By about 10 am (when I’ve been up since between 2 and 4 in the morning), however, I start to wear out and I get irritable and agitated, my anxiety level skyrockets, and my mood spirals downward. The feelings I have once I shift into the darkness are so disparate to how I feel in the early mornings, and I haven’t been able to shift back out of them.
She pointed out that it is a pattern for many bipolar people to feel better in the mornings and then sink as the day goes on, whereas people who suffer from “just” depression tend to feel low more consistently.
The main thing that has kept me firmly refusing to consider the possibility that I might be bipolar is the fact that my shifts in mood are fast… Borderline fast. So I asked her how fast the cycles can be for a rapid cycling bipolar. She said she’s seen people with ultradian cycling: cycling multiple times in a single day.
Well, shit.
The more I hear and read about bipolar, the more I wonder if I really might be bipolar. I’m starting to think I actually am rather than wondering if I am. Which means I have to do a lot more research, because I don’t know enough about it.
I have to research, to understand how things apply to me, to fully understand an idea, concept, diagnosis, whatever. The doctor might make the diagnosis, but I have to do my research to truly understand it, and I will speak up if I don’t agree with something. I’ve always claimed that I’ve never had a manic episode. I may or may not have had a “typical” manic episode, but I think I will find, if I look, that it fits for me.
Last week I wasn’t at all okay with the fact that I might be bipolar. I was firmly rooted in Borderline. Today, though, I’m a little more at peace with it. I’ll decide how I really feel after I do my research.
There is actually much more from our session that I need to write about, but it’ll have to wait for another post. My mom’s coming home tomorrow, and I have a lot to do to get ready for her.
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