I'm tired, but stopping the marathon seems counterproductive.
Starting in August of last year, I crashed into a bipolar episode like one I've never before experienced. 2010 had been a whirlwind of things, and I had really focused on dating and my dissertation. At the end of the year, I'd chosen a mate and was really barreling toward finishing my dissertation .
In April of 2011, I finished that damn thing and defended. I had revisions, but fucking A I was just around the corner from being done. I spent the summer doing the revisions slowly and finished those, too, and got it approved. I was supposed to revise one of my chapters for publication, format my dissertation and graduate by August. But after my defense, I got a rash and we thought it was my psych med. We tried to change it, sending me on a roller coaster of new meds, all with these fucking crazy side effects. It's a long story about all of that, but it ranged from not being ">able to sit still to not being able to ugly control my motor functions.
We stopped the roller coaster and I wasn't on anything briefly, then another, then nothing, I think.
On July 29, I was at Thuan's and I just started bawling after the girls went to bed and this incredible anxiety crashed into me and i just.....didnt want to go to my apartment. I can't explain it, except that my apartment was near a club and kind of loud. I had always just put on headphones and gone on about my business, but I just freaked out and continued to freak out the entire way home. I didn't sleep that night, despite my headphones
I woke up in this strange haze after not sleeping rather night before. What was this odd feeling?
It didn't stop. It barreled through me and after another failed attempt at a med, we risked putting me back on my old medication. I jolted up and then crashed again.
He started me on this medication that seemed to start working, but the one night I tried to stay at my place, I ended up having a four-hour panic attack. Four hours. FOUR. My hands were crossed over my chest, all funereal, because I could not bear to move, not even to call anyone to help me.q
I can't recount everything that happened over the following months in an LJ post, obviously, but my friends began to shuffle me around to places. I stayed with Thuan as much as I could and he did everything he could every night, even when he had the girls, while my psychiatrist did everything he could to get me to sleep. Camomile tea. The couch with several pillows. Him right beside me for comfort, staying awake as much as he could to be there if I woke up freaking out. The same movie every night (HP 7.1) to lull me to sleep. I'd get two hours. I'm not shitting you.
Honestly, I've been through a lot of pain in my life, but I've never specifically felt this terrified. Not suicidal, really. Terrified. I'd call my psychiatrist every day and beg for him to find a way t make it stop, and he would comfort me and tell me I was mortifying myself by saying I felt crazy and wish I didn't need meds and whatever.
Finally, Monty and Ali, two of my good friends who had an extra room, stepped in and opened their home to me while I worked to get someone to take my apartment. I crashed the first two nits there just out of the comfort, and shortly thereafter my psychiatrist found a med for me that started to work. I'd only wake up a few times at night. And then someone took my apartment.
Mind you. Monty and Ali had a baby on the way, and that baby is now 3 months old. I still live there and I pay rent. A things will be this way for a title while as I continue to recover. It's January. I now know why my psychiatrist wouldn't commit to telling me how long he thought it would take for me to come out of this. It's because he knew it could be as long as a year and that I would lose my shit with that knowledge.
I had a friend message me telling me psychiatrists killed his mother and he wanted to save me. Oh, God. Oh, God. I tear up just thinking about what that felt like, how far I've come and how the fuck I managed to miss so little work.
Like Mary Rowlandson, I see that time as a "Night Season," an unforgettable trauma. Have I been through worse? Well, I don't know because my past pains were completely different experiences.
As I type this, I realize that I'm only now beginning to heal and be able to really expressed what happened to me. Honestly, I just lulled this up impulsively and just began jotting it all down like some train began chugging and I just got n board.
A train away from terrified, sleepless, me. A train that is going to make stops this year as best as I can.
I should slow down. I'm working, teaching, caring for the man who cared so deeply for me and his incredible four children, starting voice lessons, getting some sketches and starting the process for my first tattoo, updating my wardrobe, hitting the gym for the endorphins and improved sleep. I'm told my Monty and Ali to chill out.
But how can I stop the train that's uncovering a me that was always, always there and was just too afraid t show it's face?
(forgive the un-cut version and the typos. I was metaphorically pounding this out on my LJ app and I haven't figured the whole thing out, yet)
Posted via LiveJournal app for iPad.