depression

DepressedBrain in a Five-Item List

/ Alyxander James / Leave a comment

It’s been a bit of a rough week, between the return of DepressedBrain and the fact that all the cottonwood fluff flying around Chicago has me wheezing. So I’m keeping it simple for the blog today.

  1. Everything is overwhelming. I’ve been giving myself a pretty packed schedule (particularly for the introverted homebody that I am), and while I was manic, I was handling everything fine. Now, though…I’m recognizing that this might be part of the reason I’ve been more anxious the past couple of weeks. DepressedBrain is easily overwhelmed.
  2. It’s really hard to focus. I’ve been finding myself forgetting things a lot. I’ll walk into a room and not remember why I was headed in that direction. Today I got a support request call at work, and after I took the notes and assured the caller I would take a look at it, I hung up and promptly forgot that there was something that needed looking at. Imagine my embarrassment when they called back later to ask if I’d been able to make any progress, and I had to tell them I had been sidetracked and hadn’t gotten there yet. (Thankfully, they were extremely gracious, and I was able to knuckle down and deal with the issue once I hung up from that call.)
  3. Nothing is particularly exciting. I am a passionate person. It rarely takes much to get me excited about things, and when I get excited, I am like a small child: I bounce around a lot and I don’t shut up. But my passions are often intimately tied to my mania. New things that I know I was excited about two weeks ago have lost their luster. Even things that I’ve been excited about for years aren’t doing much to raise my energy level. I feel trapped in this perpetual state of “meh.”
  4. All I want to do is sleep. This is often the case: I’ve been particularly sleepy since diving into the whole second puberty thing. But it’s harder to wake up now than it has been in a long time. I also have this sinking feeling that I should be expecting a visit from the insomnia monster sometime soon, which never helps.
  5. Everything hurts. This is a pretty common state of being for me (I have back and knee problems, and chronic pain is so normalized by my experience that I forget that not everyone deals with it), but between the dampness outside, feeble attempts at Aikido, and the fact that those “depression hurts” commercials really weren’t lying…yeah. It hasn’t been fun. (The silver lining of this is that last week I discovered the miracle that is Tiger Balm. As someone who has a rather ridiculous tolerance for things like ibuprofen or aspirin, finding something that makes my knees feel like they might not explode when I go up and down stairs is a pretty huge deal. So that’s been nice.)

Accidental Fudge Episode 32: AnxietyBrain Strikes Back

/ Alyxander James / 1 Comment

It’s been one of those weeks.

Being Bipolar means that my brain has multiple modes of existence. The two big ones are ManicBrain and DepressedBrain, but there are others that can manifest themselves in different ways depending on which end of a cycle I’m on. The worst of them, the one that causes days when my brain and I just don’t get along, is AnxietyBrain.

I was first diagnosed as Bipolar II five years ago. I’d been wrestling with cyclical mood changes for several years at that point, and finally having a name to attach to the thing that was happening made it all a lot easier to manage. I am medicated enough that I don’t go flying off too far to either extreme, and I have a host of coping mechanisms that work well for me about ninety percent of the time.

The other ten percent of the time, I am just barely hanging on. Nine times out of ten, this is because I’m being visited by AnxietyBrain.

This week has been full of AnxietyBrain. For the most part, it’s just been generalized, unfocused nervousness. I get a little twitchy. I feel vaguely unsettled. But then Monday rolled around, and as I was waiting for a bus and trying to talk myself into going somewhere and doing something intimidating, I nearly blacked out. In the end, I admitted defeat and went home feeling like a failure, because I’m not supposed to be the sort of person who gets so overwhelmed by such trivial things.

I wish there was some sort of descriptor for the state between generalized, low-grade worry and the sort of panic that causes a person to think they’re having a heart attack. I worry that applying the label of “panic attack” to the seemingly endless stretches of heart-pounding, trembling, dizzying time that I spend trying not to hyperventilate, trying not to let anyone else see how completely unhinged I feel is too extreme, because I never think my heart is going to stop…I just don’t know how long I can handle hearing its racing staccato before I scream. It’s probably a useless thing to worry about, but hey, that’s what AnxietyBrain is best at: taking trivial, mundane things and fixating on them in such a way that they gnaw at the fabric of sanity until the vague feelings of unease compound and snowball and turn into something monstrous.

On top of the AnxietyBrain, I think I’m heading into a bit of a down swing. My depressive episodes have been unbelievably mild and unexpectedly brief for the past seven months or so (whether this is tied to the fact that I started on testosterone around that time, I don’t know for sure). This has been nice. However, past experience has taught me not to trust that this will last, so every time I feel myself slipping down from ManicBrain in the direction of DepressedBrain, I am apprehensive. DepressedBrain has significantly less energy than its partner, and that makes it hard to keep up with life. I have a lot of activities packed into my life these days, and I am not confident that DepressedBrain has the horsepower to handle all of that. This, of course, makes the AnxietyBrain that much worse.

I’m not entirely certain what the point of this particular post is, other than to say sometimes, brains are frustrating, and no matter how much we might know, from a rational standpoint, that the current state of things will probably not last forever, it doesn’t really make what’s happening NOW any easier…and there’s always that lingering doubt. What if this is the way things are now? What if I’m stuck being an anxious ball of sad forever? It sucks.

What does help, though, is the knowledge that my life is full of extraordinary people, people who love me and will not stop loving me even if I am an anxious ball of sad forever. They will let me be anxious and sad, if that is what I need to be, but they will also comfort and cheer me, and I know that if anything or anyone has the power to get me out of a slump, it’s the incredible people I am blessed to call friends and family.