Brittle, Bitter, & Battle-Hardened

I have come to the conclusion (again) that whether I like it or not, I desperately need therapy.

Medication has helped. A lot, actually. But the truth is, I think it's gone about as far as it can go on its own.

I am broken in a number of ways, and I don't think that type of shit heals itself. It's like when I broke my hand falling off a horse (naturally) the summer before my freshman year in college. I shattered the bone in front of the knuckle of the little finger on my left hand. Not only did the break go all the way through, but there was also a piece of bone that splintered off from the rest and settled away from the joint. It wasn't treated properly because the doctor I had was an incompetent piece of shit--imagine that--and so even though the break healed, the hand still doesn't work the way it's supposed to. I can't straighten that finger out all the way (eleven years later), and I'm relatively sure that arthritis has set in now because it bothers me a lot more than it used to nowadays.

But, again, it's been eleven years. The only thing anyone could do now would be to do surgery to go back in, re-break the fucking thing, pin it back together, and wait for it to heal. Even if I had insurance to pay for that, it wouldn't be worth the trouble.

I think this thing inside me is the same way. The bone--so to speak--has knitted itself back together, and there's no longer an acute, oh-god-this-is-a-fucking-emergency kind of pain. But it didn't heal the way it should've, and it doesn't work the way it's supposed to. It still hurts, but it's a dull, chronic ache rather than a stabbing pain.

Or something like that.

I have long been open to the possibility that there's something else wrong with me besides the bipolar. I don't doubt for a moment that I am--or have, depending on how you wanna word it--bipolar. "Bipolar I with psychotic features" is a diagnosis that fits all too well for me to argue about it. But it's hardly unusual for mental illnesses to come in groups. In fact, it's more unusual for someone to have only one, I think. Certainly, there are things about me that can't be explained away by the bipolar.

I'm angry. I, like the Hulk, am always angry. The difference between now, when I'm decently medicated, and then, when I was at my sickest, is that it's not as intense. If anger is a fire, it was always burning when I was at my maddest. All it took was the slightest gust of wind to stir it, make it flare up, and burn everybody in shooting distance. I used to terrify people with my fury. I know, because they told me so.

Now it's more like a smoldering ember, hidden under the burnt-out ashes of the conflagrations that came before. It's there. It burns hot. But a gust of wind is no longer enough to stir it up. There are too many ashes laying atop it for wind to have much of an effect. You have to throw gas on it to get it to flare now. But it's always there, nonetheless.

It manifests itself mostly as bitterness now. Cynicism and bitterness--the last refuge of the disillusioned.

Sure, most people will never notice. I'm charming now--charismatic, even, when I want to be. (That I rarely want to be is beside the point.) Eventually, when enough shit happens to you, you lose the ability to give a fuck what people think about you and then just say and do whatever you want. If you're interesting/intelligent/quirky enough, people find it charming. Works for me.

But I know--and I suspect my closest friends know--that it's not a confidence borne of something healthy. It's fatalistic. Nothing ever changes, so what does it matter? Why throw up false pretenses anymore? It's not as though it'll change anything, not as though the end will be anything other than what it's going to be, anyhow, not as though my life will ever be anything other than a massive shitstorm. So fuck it.

I think that's the motto of my life now: Fuck it.

I'm old and weary and brittle and bitter and battle-hardened, and nothing matters anymore.

And still I push on, some inner stubbornness or spitefulness or hyper-developed sense of self-preservation spurring me on to whatever other shitty surprises life has in store for me.

I have long feared that I'm cursed with the personality disorder that strikes fear into the hearts of clinicians everywhere: borderline personality disorder. I can usually reason myself out of the belief if I try hard enough. I am exceptional at lying to myself, after all. I can create an entirely new reality in my head if I have to, if the "real" one is too much for me to face...and don't think I haven't made use of it on more than one occasion.

But I'm currently reading something online--something that's too embarrassing to admit to out loud, so we're going to skim right over that part. There's a character in it who's as mad as a hatter, who has borderline. It's absolutely fucking scary how familiar the behavior is, how perfectly the mindset matches up, how the beliefs and rationalizations are the same fucking things I tell myself--have told myself--for years and years and years.

Admittedly, I don't exhibit some of the more dramatic symptoms. I never was a cutter, for instance. (Why hurt yourself when you can find someone else to do it--and do it even better--for you, I always thought.) And a lot of the overblown bullshit is tamped down by a combination of my meds and my own fear of the monster that lives in my head. I guess I'm what happens when someone who's that sick starts burning out.

I'm not going to be that asshole who self-diagnoses and then runs around using it as an excuse to do...whatever. I suspect that's another one of the things that's wrong with me, yes. It would explain SO much. But I'm not particularly eager to claim the label, for one, and for another, I would rather let a professional diagnose it. I've never been known for my sound judgment, after all.

But still...a lot of the stuff--including the anger--fits.

So that brings us back to "Bunny needs a therapist." Which brings us back to the same thing we always come back to. In order to go to a therapist, Bunny needs money. In order to have money, Bunny needs to work. In order to be able to work without being a train wreck, Bunny needs a therapist.

So, yeah...seems like fatalism is really the only path one can take when faced with that particular set of circumstances.

Eh...fuck it. Not like it really matters, anyway, I guess. Eventually, the whole world will burn, anyway, with or without my help.

*Sigh*

Fuck it.

The Difference

I'm back on meds...again.

Wednesday is my one day off work, so I took some of the money I got paid for some blog work I did and went to my parents' house Tuesday night after I got off. I tried to go to the doctor on Wednesday because I need some new prescriptions, but that ended up being a clusterfuck, so I'm going to try again in a couple of weeks, I hope. I've been without Ambien for way too long, and my sleep just does whatever it wants.

But I had, like, nine refills on my Wellbutrin and one more on my Lamictal, so I took my ass to the pharmacy--where I used to work in the freaking soda fountain when I was 18--and got my refills.

I still struggle with my illness, even on meds, but sometimes all it takes is having to go off your meds for awhile to see how far you've come.

I'd been off for nearly a month, and I hated everyone and everything, and I desperately wanted to watch the world burn. I was angry--God, so angry. That was the depression. It came first, bringing the anger, the lack of motivation, the tears, the despair, the effed up sleep patterns, the leaden paralysis as it's called, the inability to get out of bed, the serious suicidal thoughts. (Re: suicidal thoughts: After Wednesday's failed doctor visit, I was extremely upset because I really do need to see the doctor quite badly. In order to get from my parents' house to the doctor, one has to cross a bridge over a river. I was so fucked up and desperate and hopeless on my way back that I came within a gnat's ass of stopping and jumping off the bridge. NB, I am rather afraid of bridges, so I was clearly out of my goddamned mind at that point in time. The only thing that stopped me was not an overwhelming will to live or fear of what my death would do to the people I left behind. It was only the fear that the bridge was not high enough for me to die when I hit the shallow water beneath it, and I thought a life as a quadriplegic would be worse than life as a crazy person. I'm sharing that because I can never tell anyone, couldn't stand for anyone to know how weak I am, and my secret is safe here.) But I'd run out of Wellbutrin first, so it only made sense that that was what would come first.

When I ran out of Lamictal, I didn't notice much of a change...at first. Then, my sleep got more and more erratic, and by the end, the paranoia was creeping back in.

Even my mother noticed how bad off I was, which is saying something, considering how she tries to make out like it's all in my head.

As soon as I got the bottles from the pharmacy, I ripped the bag open and popped one of each. I'd only slept about 3 hours the night before, so I can't say that I noticed a huge change because I was too tired to feel anything but exhausted. But I came back home Wednesday night and slept for about 12 hours. After another dose of medicine in the morning, I felt better. Not back to normal, not yet able to ready be productive, but no longer actively wanting to kill myself or someone else.

Finally, today, it clicked. I caught up on everything I was behind on, even after a miserable 24-hour shift (ugh). I cooked (miracle of miracles), cleaned my kitchen, did dishes, washed all my bedclothes and replaced them, and wrote ten client blogs. (Now I'm writing this and am about to go to bed and read until I fall asleep.) I'm sure tomorrow won't be even half as productive, but I don't care. I'm more than caught up now. I'm slightly ahead. :)

I can see colors again. I am no longer demanding to bathe in the blood of everyone who vaguely annoys me. And, yes, I may be mildly manic--and almost surely am--but I've gotten so behind on everything for lack of motivation that I'm just going to ride it for the handful of days that it'll last before the Lamictal catches up with it and knocks it back down.

But it does bring up an interesting question: If the difference between "not depressed" and "depressed" is so blatantly different (or the difference between "mixed state" and "no longer actively batshit," your choice), how come no one--my friends, my family, anybody--ever tried to help me during all those years that I struggled so hard?

Oh. Because it never benefited them to do so. Duh.

That's frustrating to accept because my life could've gone so much differently. If someone had had me in the doctor's office at 13 or 14, when it really started becoming noticeable, I sincerely doubt I'd be in the shitty situation I'm in now. If someone had had me in there at 18 or 25, even, it would've stopped the downhill crash, I think.

But, oh, well. What do you do? It's done now, and I'm crawling back out of the hole again. Or trying to, anyway. *Sigh*

On the other hand, it does bring up another interesting point. I wonder if, when I'm feeling really depressed in spite of taking my meds, it's worth going off of them for two or three days or so and then starting them back again. The shock to my brain, the difference between "medicated" and "unmedicated" after I restart my meds when I (involuntarily, I might add) have to go off of them, is so profound that I think it would stop a depressive episode in its tracks. Or at least make it seem better than it was before.

It's not the ideal solution, of course, but it might be something I can try until I can do better.

Next step? A new Ambien prescription and birth control. It's not that I need the birth control for its original intended purpose (broken innards FTW!), but I think something like Nuva-Ring would do wonders for getting rid of the usual premenstrual depression. I mean, if you're not having a period, it's hard to fall into a pit of despair the week before it starts.

Ok, I'm rambling. Bed now.