I hide it well

Well... I'm going through depression again. Of course there is no reason. But I just want to be at home and cry. But I'm at school because there is a quiz today so I need to be here. And to make it better, I have to work tonight. I may need to increase my anti-depressant again. We decreased it slightly when I was working to get over that manic episode. Damn chemistry.

I would like to share something with all of my readers (ps. I do have my first official follower - exciting). This is off another blog that I read (Brilliant Mind Broken Body - original text can be found at http://brilliantmindbrokenbody.wordpress.com/2010/03/20/sliding-sideways/). This is an excellent description of my day to day progress but is written better than I can do so I'm including an excerpt here.

"Bipolarism is another matter altogether. Part of the trouble with it is the vigilance needed. I (and to a lesser extent, the boyfriend) have to watch for hints of mania and depression. Am I sleeping less than usual? More? Do I end up talking faster and getting excited about seemingly insignificant things? Am I…grey, with no strong feelings about anything? (sorry, it’s a state that’s hard to describe).

And then there’s when it hits. Both upswings and downswings are dangerous to my relationships. In upswings, I am easily angered and prone to snapping and fighting. I have boundless enthusiasm and am less than pleasant when others don’t go along with it. I’m thin skinned and easily hurt. There’s a lurking mild paranoia that everyone is talking about me behind my back and secretly can’t stand me (which has only been aggrivated by periods in my life where that has been mostly true). In downswings, I have such a deep inertia that it is almost impossible to get me moving, physically or emotionally. Physically, I am tired and want to sleep a lot, and I don’t really want to get out of bed. I don’t care about eating, which means I either forget to eat or eat far too much of things I find tempting. I also eat a lot of convenience food, because preparing something more wholesome is just too much work. I worry deeply about the future, and question the futility of continuing with law school constantly. I often go incommunicado, speaking only in class or when spoken to directly. I don’t sign on instant messenger or call people, and I often retreat into books. When I’m depressed, it’s incredibly hard to manage basic self-care, so things like showering tend to get farther apart than I would like, and my physical disabilities make this worse.

A lot of literature and some people talk about sliding ‘down’ into depression. For me, none of the psych issues I have feel like sliding ‘down’ or ‘up’ so much as they feel like a shift…sideways. A paradigm shift, a fundamental change in the relationship between me and the universe. Sometimes, as with a bipolar depression cycle, it’s a subtle, slow shift that can be hard to spot until I’m really far out and start getting a bit irrational. Other times, like panic attacks, it is as if the world SNAPS sideways, violently and suddenly, and the change is painful and frightening. My perspective is so altered that my former perspective is incomprehensible, or worse yet it feels like my former perspective is completely, utterly wrong.

With those more sudden shifts, I cannot actually tell that what I feel and sense is not rational processing."

I typically describe it as yesterday was normal; today is normal; tomorrow will be normal; the day after that, I'll cry for no reason. You can't really feel the shift happen so you aren't really aware of it until suddenly you have to start to fight to regain ground. It sucks. But that's life. Or at least mine.