I HAVEN'T written for ages because I was too depressed to bother to get up and make it this far from my house to the internet cafe. What happened is, I spent a week or so barely sleeping at all. I felt a bit "high" because I was obsessed with Brazil and going to Brazil and living in Brazil and speaking Portuguese. Which I am not normally.
People seem bemused by my last post, but you have to bear in mind I was very miserable when I wrote it, and could not imagine ever feeling any better. So I write about "wanting to get clean" and then say but I will never be happy when I am clean! what this means is I want to get clean and then I want to die! I spent most of the past month angrily plotting suicide and musing on what a deception it is to feel "normal" and how anybody who wants to live is delusional and has been absolutely conned.
Do I really think I'm terminally unique? I mean, yes I am as a person. We all are. But as a manic-depressive junkie, am I unique?
Well most junkies are NOT clinically manic-depressive and I AM. So that does cause a complete comprehension-block in certain circumstances. For one thing, I have learned from the current popular culture to view unhappiness as a kind of illness. And manic depression always has been regarded as an illness. And so when I am feeling REALLY unhappy a kind of schism becomes apparent in me, where I feel ill and will sometimes think "I'm ill" but at the same time I'm locked up in my own head with somebody who I really hate and I will beat this person up severely for claiming to be ill and tell him EXCUSES EXCUSES. ALL YOU EVER MAKE IS EXCUSES. GET A LIFE. BETTER STILL GET A DEATH.
I think all addicts know misery and that many know clinical depression. But my problem, medically, as far as I know is NOT just clinical depression, it's manic depression and that causes a constant shift in self-esteem that is very disconcerting and difficult to live with. In fact the last time I went to see my doctor I was determined to demand one of those agreements that states that should I ever become seriously ill, through any cause I want to be allowed to die. "Unfortunately" my mood brightened considerably a couple of days before the appointment and so my dearly-held desire slipped away from me...
Brooding brooding. I keep brooding brooding. Or planning. Planning planning. I have so many bright ideas in my head. I call them ambitions. Probably if I told you them you'd consider them ideas above my station.
The "brooding" comes in because I want to know HOW to make these dreams come true. Even in the most elementary sense.
I'm no longer obsessed with getting "clean" because the obsession with drugs has receded, just as high tide beomes low. So I no longer care the way I once did...
I was seized by this feeling the other night, like I'd downed far too much black coffee. And wondered why this strange internal reslessness. Then I happened to glance out of the window (which was wide open as I've installed a satellite indoors that the pigeons flap in and perch on) and the moon was FULL. In fact it was just waning, but I'm convinced the moon's effect on the brain is strongest when first waning. Just as highest summer and bitterest midwinter come AFTER the solstice so the bipolar part of the brain begins to itch the most AFTER full moon.
Mmmm. Binky says I'm starting to act manic. It's true my sleep cycle is all over the place but a skewed sleep-cycle is not mania (though it may be a sign of impending mania). I don't think I'm manic. Just because I turn impressionist a lot these days and talk in loud Scottish accents doesn't mean I'm "high". I'm normal. I'm just a person stuck in the bogs of Heroin Addiction looking for a rung up. Rungs rungs! Somebody help me please! Where are rungs for sale?!
5 comments:
My boyfriend is bipolar as well. I cannot imagine what it would be like to live with that, having witnessed him struggling to cope with it (on and off meds--with meds he's generally pretty stable, and now even off them for a few weeks he's okay). I'm glad you're not suicidal anymore. Really, if you think about it, life is just a journey of your consciousness that you only get 1 of, might as well experience it until it ends even if it is shitty there will be good times still. At least, that's what I tell myself to keep me from trying to kill myself again.
P.S. if you find the rung sale, help a sister out and let me know ;)
I think I'm with Syd here. You seem to think there is a special reason why you can't stop taking drugs, or why your depression is any different to anyone else's. These are just constant excuses not to get clean. I don't get it. It says right there at the top of the blog that this should be a blog detailing a life without heroin. It isn't. You come up with these grandiose schemes for learning languages, making money etc, but sometimes it seems you can't perform basic tasks like taking care of yourself. It's very frustrating for a reader, not to mention actually quite boring. I appreciate that you may actually be unwell, but you don't seem willing to accept the help that's offered to you unless it's on your terms. Life doesn't work like that.
Emily--you nailed it. Grandiosity and terminal uniqueness are characteristics of addicts/alcoholics. Every excuse why not to get clean or get help. Same old, same old. Gleds, I'm glad that you are still alive. I keep wondering when you will go too far. I hope not ever, but if you keep going down this path, at some point, there will be no more you. It happens to celebs and other people thousands of times a day. Not a happy prognosis.
I wish you the best but no one here can do anything for you. I care but am tired of your not being serious about getting clean. Maybe your mental illness is real or maybe it is heroin induced. Who knows until you quit the junk?
Emily I wrote something today and posted it just now. A lot of it is a reply direct to you.
Lucy thanks
Grandiose? That's me baby ;-)
Eye LOVE Brazil and have wanted to live there since childhood. We should totally go!
Eye LOVE plans, dreams, living in the future. it doesn't make it happen though, just makes a person happy to get wrapped up in.
The grandiose thing, delusions of grandeur, seen it in people who aren't addicts too. The whole mental illness + drug addiction is a double whammy, at least they have dual treatment options now.
Far as being unique, well you're a unique person, but far as just your illness itself outside of the drugs - that's something to look at eye suppose. Also with having both, how many people experience the same? Your diagnosis isn't a common one though... Not saying oh you ARE just the same as this and that, just saying it's something to investigate and evaluate on your own.
You should do the radio broadcast, love to listen to it, hear what you sound like hehe!
Pretty sure eye must be type 2, eye've never had the issue of not being able to understand my own thoughts. Sure they race, but eye can keep up (other people can't keep up with it if eye speak though). No fragments. Some hallucinating - pretty sure from sleep deprivation. never heard voices. While eye did do stupid shit and had to be on the go and people couldn't keep up with me, eye was DAMN productive and lived like that most of the time. Ha, eye used to say eye had the "good kind of anxiety that makes you want to do things." Didn't understand what people meant about anxiety being horrible, and why the fuck everyone was so lazy, and so precious about their sleep. "Bipolar" never occurred to me, except for a small period of time after eye stopped tweeking. But "mother knows best" said Oh no you're not bipolar, it's just the drugs and you have depression. Years later was diagnosed... Ha the place that did so is way "borderline" diagnosis happy though. Knew a few people who were told the same. At first, eye disagreed about one, til eye observed differently. Long ago, because of the cutting and eating disorders and such, eye thought eye did have it. Til reading some books and so on about it, and figured out eye am not. The intentions and motivations and so on are not what eye have and experience.
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