Eyes on the Future...

I'M FEELING BETTER today. Less depressed. I woke up at 7 in the morning and couldn't sleep again. That means I was out for the count for only 9 hours ~ a vast improvement from the last few days where I was slumbering a good 12 hours solid each and every night. Hypersomnia, to me, is a sure sign of depression or an impending low mood.

I wish I hadn't gone on about last year's mental breakdown yet again. I have written countless posts about it and often, when I start posting on paper rather than directly online, I end up talking about my weird and wonderful experiences yet again. (But most of it I have not posted.) Obviously I have unresolved issues around this. BIG issues. I need closure, but don't know how I can ever get it. Being "bipolar" there is, of course, a big chance that I could launch into an extreme mania yet again. When I had that big breakdown in the winter of 2010/11 I had no notice at all that I was going mad. After a "lost weekend" in December my moods were cycling up and down for six weeks. Then on the Sunday I was hearing voices and depressed enough not to want to go home, so I ended up wandering the streets in the rain. The next day I felt noticably high. I remember being in the post office and laughing out loud at some fancy shopping bags they had in ultra-glowing colours featuring yellow smileys. On Tuesday I was extremely irritable and paranoid. By Wednesday I was in full-blown psychotic mania. It happened that fast and I've lost confidence in my own mind.

When I have been depressed I never thought of myself as "mentally ill", but in mania I know I am "ill". This has nothing to do with "delusions" or hallucinations (you cannot know you're delusional anyhow!). The big problem I had in extreme mania was that my thoughts were racing more than a hundred times faster than usual and I went into complete and utter confusion. I kept losing my glasses, losing my keys, my phone and I couldn't find any money. My life was complete chaos and I knew it.

So trying to deal with the after-effects was really painful. If I had to pick a serious illness to suffer from, I would choose the kind of mental problems I have over something physical like cancer every time. And schizoaffective disorder is the psychiatric equivalent of cancer. Like one doctor said to a schizophrenia-survivor I saw lecturing on her condition online, schizophrenia is worse than cancer. At least cancer has a cure. You can medicate schizophrenia, but in 80% of cases, it never goes away...

By the way it's the doctors who say I have schizophrenia. I and everyone who knows me thinks of  me as "bipolar" because sustained extreme moods are my most obvious symptoms. Like I have said before, schizophrenia is invisible to those who suffer from it. I have never walked around thinking "I feel really schizophrenic today". But on many occasions I have found myself stranded in shops, too depressed to make up my mind what to get, and thinking: "O no, I've got manic depression". Then I realize I really am a manic-depressive, and I feel even worse!

Schizoaffective disorder, by the way, means a crossover state where a person meets the full diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia and a severe mood disorder simultaneously. The main symptoms I get that are supposedly characteristic of schizophrenia rather than bipolar disorder are what my friend Pinky calls "social phobia" (I haven't socialized with anyone but her in weeks) and what I would call extreme laziness but the doctors call "negative symptoms" (don't want to do anything, lack of get-up-and-go).

This is why I'm powering on with these children's stories that are burning brightly in my head, demanding to be told... I wrote nothing yesterday because I just could not motivate myself to press forward. Yet today I'm brimming with the ideas I should have had yesterday. The fact that I'm such a hard taskmaster to myself, insisting that even when this book is finished I should have no rest and launch immediately into the next one just stresses me out. Children's books by unknown authors, I have heard, rarely get advances of more than £2000 each (about $3000). So to make a living writing, as I want to, I'd have to produce about one a month... From this point on, if I'm seriously into writing, I'll never have any rest. I have too many ideas for too many more books ever to stop ~ and like I've said before, I cannot go lost and stray, cast aimlessly adrift in life like I used to be.

I'm the only person I know who wants more from life than I have now. The only one with a dream or with any goals. And I will never ever give up on that dream ~ until I die.

Well I'm about to be timed out so I have to go. Back on the subject of mental health yet AGAIN. I can't wait till THAT is a thing of the past as well.

Have a great day everyone, and see you tomorrow...



ELEANOR LONGDEN: LEARNING FROM MY VOICES
She started hearing a voice making a running commentary on her actions in the first year of university, had a schizophrenic breakdown, but eventually went back to score the highest mark in BSc Psychology the University of Leeds had ever awarded.

She was at one point told by her psychiatrist, "You're better off with cancer because cancer is easier to cure than schizophrenia."




CONVERGENCE FIRESTORM
sPENCER fREELAND AND pHIL rEYNOLDS USED TO BE THE IN-HOUSE djS AT A CLUBNIGHT CT NAMED fRANTIC i USED TO GO TO....
Like most DJ mixes, it starts out terrible and only gets good 14 minutes in...
... and the tune at 37 minutes is the one I like best...


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