What a Grey Day...

IT IS nearly 4pm. I have been up since 10 or 11am. I go to bed relatively early and get up late because I'm sleeping 12 hours solid. Between 7 and 9am I nearly always wake up. Then I drink my methadone and fall back to sleep. Drinking my dose a good 2 hours before I get up means that once I am up, the methadone is working full-on and I'm far less tempted to use the alternative.

I had a horrible dream that my Dad, who doesn't even like taking headache pills, had a couple of ounces of very low grade, dark brown heroin.

Usually when I wake up after a dream like that, I just want to use. But today it never even crossed my mind.

I got up, got tomorrow's methadone (because I pick it up a day in advance) and for some reason, youtubed up the Prisoner Cell Block H theme, which made me so sad I nearly cried.

I have felt lousy all day. I never even bothered showering until ten minutes ago. I have been stuck in a chair, staring at television, not wanting to move.

Yesterday, I suppose I managed about 900 words of this children's story, which is supposed to be ridiculous comedy. I was going to force out another 600 words (2 manuscript pages) last night, but had taken my medication too early and just wanted to sleep.

I'm only on 300mg (quetiapine). My friend is on 750 mg quetiapine (Seroquel) plus TWO antidepressants ~ mirtazapine and venlafaxine (Remeron and Effexor). What the doctors are trying to do in her case is medicate the very changeable moods of borderline personality disorder (her quetiapine is for schizophrenic psychosis) but I'm not sure this can ever work.

The BPD is sometimes considered to be on the "bipolar spectrum" but the mood swings in BPD ~ swinging from OK (not euphoric or high) to very angry, frustrated or sad ~ are totally different from bipolar moods which in my case have, at the extreme, alternated between highest exaltation and deepest despair, although I can get extremely irritable at both poles, especially mania.

Anyway I am not and have not been even hypomanic for several weeks. I am now getting more and more depressed.

Under normal cirumstances my moods aren't very much more extreme than those of Stephen Fry as filmed for the Secret Life of the Manic Depressive documentary, although when I'm hypomanic I'm probably more hyper, more cheerful and prone to laugh uproariously  over practically nothing. My attitude towards the "illness" is similar to his. He was taking no medication and I don't want any more than I'm on. The last thing I want is a mood that's pancake-flat.

I also agree with the man who says he's seen angels in psychotic mania ~ that it's worth any amount of misery to go that high. [I didn't see angels: I felt trillions of volts powering through my brain and went into outer space.]

But I agree with Carrie Fisher too ~ eventually I'm going far too fast. Thoughts are racing totally out of control. Then they all crash into each other and become completely garbled. The whole world is in ridiculous slow motion. So that when the computer asked me for a password and then spent what felt like months considering my answer before allowing me in, I very nearly sent it crashing across the room, on many occasions.

Someone once asked me how, if I was in such a mess, I managed to put up posts with pictures. The answer is, I very nearly didn't. The pictures only appeared hours later and the effort of finding them put me into near-meltdown with yelling and swearing and the computer was lucky to survive at all.

In mania the symptoms vary widely over the course of a day. So when I was in complete confusion ~ which lasted for hours ~ I never posted at all. I couldn't even speak coherently, let alone write, And there were many occasions when I literally could not read at all.

As for "liking" being bipolar, if my mood continues to fall, ask me the same question in a couple of weeks and you might get a very different answer.

(I'm not trying to say, by the way, that I enjoy losing my mind, just that I love the extremely high moods... And why does the world have to be so crap that the only "illness" that makes you feel better than anything else is the same one that shows you utter hopeless bleakness and despair?)

Over the last couple of days, I took to wondering, if I ever did achieve success, how I would possibly cope. The answer is, if I ever made any serious money (how would I do that anyway?) I would be extremely stressed by it. But would still far rather be rich than poor. The only thing it could pay for is a change of scenery and I would use it to insulate me from the world as much as possible. And I don't think I will ever find true happiness. Never, ever.

I have just been watching, with one eye, a documentary about the Baader-Meinhof gang and Stammheim prison. I love TV programmes about the Cold War era, the Iron Curtain and the Eastern Bloc. That's one reason I so like watching telly in German.

My house is getting more and more untidy. I don't mind cleaning sinks, surfaces and showers ~ what I hate is clearing, sweeping, scrubbing and mopping the floor ~ and it requires all four. So most of the rubbish is on the floor now, uncleared up.

The Great Bathroom Stench, by the way, has temporarily gone. I know if I call the landlord, the bad smell will hide, only to return with avengeance once he's left.

I should end on an inspiring note ~ weeks before that man made the 128,000 ft leap from space to earth, another guy in America, constructed a gas baloon with a camera that filmed the whole ride up right into the stratosphere. When it fell to earth with a GPS, they found it and you can watch the film here.

Fastforward 2 mins 15 in to see the launch...



And here's that Prisoner Cell Block H tune...



*