Moods

WELL I WAS OK YESTERDAY. I cannot sleep properly. So I was awake half Tuesday night, then in bed again on Boxing Day afternoon. Then I couldn't sleep Boxing Day night either, despite having gone to bed after 3am. At about 5:30 I decided to get up again.

Then the fire alarm went off in the hall and made me feel really excited. Not irritable. Excited and high. I never used to get randomly excited until I turned officially bipolar two years ago. You see: it's changed my reactions to everything, including smoke alarms. I think the alarm's been going off, by the way, because of the water still dripping through the ceiling and that's buggered the electrics. Anyway I'm not manic. When I eventually went to bed at 6:30 I did sleep until about 2pm so that's 7 hrs 30. No real loss of sleep. And I woke up feeling depressed, ukh, and can you believe this?~~ went and scored two tiddly bags of heroin for £15. This after that supposed had my "last hit" on Xmas Day... Well, I did promise myself to give up for New Year and it's still only December 27th. I'm terrified of getting full-blown heroin dependency back, when I really cannot live without it and the methadone will not suffice at all, no matter what the dose. (I lived that way for YEARS.) The heroin hasn't lifted my mood today. I'm still dysthymic today. This means my mood is cycling in a low-grade way, or to put it another way, I'm getting "mood-swings" every day. I came down from hypomania on Wednesday last week (19th); Tuesday was the last full day of it. Ever since then I've been feeling up and down and sometimes depressed, sometimes excited. In other words, the symptoms have never fully gone away. I had a cup of tea at 5:30am and thought the tea was making me high. Until I realized the cup was full and I hadn't touched a drop.

In fact I just checked my blog. On Tuesday, December 4th I was complaining of feeling down. By Saturday 8th I was saying: I woke up at four a.m. and tried drinking hot tea to keep warm and either the tea or the lack of sleep has made me high and I'm feeling so good I don't NEED drugs. (Disrupted sleep is often one of the first signs of mania. As, of course, is feeling high.) On Monday 10 December I said: I've managed to switch myself out of depression by cutting DOWN my medication. Now I feel stone cold normal most of the time. Except when I get this weird meaningless feeling of excitement, which is really entertaining. But the main problem is IT'S COLD... FAR TOO COLD! And I'm drinking tea to stay warm and the caffeine makes me hyper and high. So I spent half the night playing All Saints songs on top volume... I mentioned feeling "excited" on Tuesday 11th, too. On Wednesday 12th, in my post "Off My Tits On Tea", I said: My mood is intermittently "up". Two cups and I was "speeding off my tits". By Thursday 13th I was saying: I'm not in any type of elevated mood. Or other mood. But I know myself well enough to realize that the mere mention of "elevated mood" meant I probably was in one, but the mood was uneven. (Otherwise I wouldn't have mentioned it at all.) On Friday 14th I was posting "I Wanna Job" ~ and I did. I must have been feeling very well indeed to be saying that. Between Saturday 15th and Tuesday 18th I was most definitely high and Binky was telling me I was "really manic". So the up-mood lasted two weeks. A week afterwards, and the signs are still there. But I'm not hypomanic now (overtalkative, overconfident, hyperkinetic, racing thoughts, distractible). I have to keep track of this, because I want to know precisely how this happens, what the first signs are, and the precise pattern. Oh, and I had one of those otherworldly experiences early in the morning, where bizarre thoughts are pushed right into my head: Num-num-num-yes. Num-num-num-YES! Making me feel I was going crazy. I didn't start shrinking or sprialling out of my body, however (like I have before).

O there's somebody watching porn opposite me. Why do these porn stars always insist on filming in houses decorated in grey and white with magnolia walls. To me, that is the epitome of bad taste. And why must it always be shot in the full glare of daylight. Are they afraid of shadows in Porn Land? Oh, she's taking it right up the dirtbox now.

Ukh: my mood really is uneven today. Half an hour ago I said I was dysthymic. But now I feel off my tits on black coffee again. I haven't had a single cup of coffee all day. I've had only one cup of tea since getting up.

Binky has still got my Xmas Present, which she forgot to give me. After going to bed and sleeping all through Christmas Dinner, which I forgot to mention yesterday. She said she hadn't slept in days. In fact, she claims rarely to sleep properly, complaining of "racing thoughts" in the night. I've no idea what she means by that. Lots of people say their thoughts are "racing" when they experience anxiety. But I had free-floating anxiety for years, and my thoughts never raced. In fact, I never had proper Racing Thoughts until I went manic a couple of years ago, and then they raced with such velocity they became unintelligable.

Here is a good description of my mental process during hypomania. But I wouldn't describe this as my mind racing. I'd say my head was flooded with thoughts, that I was thinking a lot. Not that my thoughts were racing. They don't "race" until they're literally on fast-forward and then, as I say, I'm already too maniacally incoherent to make sense of them.

Racing thoughts may be experienced as background or take over a person's consciousness. Thoughts, music, and voices might be zooming through one's mind. There also might be a repetitive pattern of voice or of pressure without any associated "sound". It is a very overwhelming and irritating feeling, and can result in losing track of time.
Generally, racing thoughts are described by an individual who has had an episode as an event where the mind uncontrollably brings up random thoughts and memories and switches between them very quickly. Sometimes they are related, as one thought leads to another; other times they are completely random. A person suffering from an episode of racing thoughts has no control over his or her train of thought and it stops them from focusing on one topic or prevents sleeping.
Racing thoughts, also referred to as "racing mind", may prevent a person from falling asleep.
(Wikipedia.)

Well I wish for New Year that I didn't have to Think about any of this any more. Or have cause purposefully Not To Think About It, and to feel exceedingly irritated whenever the issue crossed my mind, as it has often been wont to do. Because I consider psychiatry to be a religion. Like all religion it fascinates me. And like most religion I'm sure that 99% is UTTER HOGWASH!

Oh finally I saw the Downton Abbey Christmas special at 4:30 today. I missed the Xmas Day airing thanks to my totally disjointed sleep cycles.

Sorry if this is boring. I ought to keep my mood records separately, only I don't keep a journal. And if I did, I'd only keep misplacing it. Or getting paranoid about psychotic stalkers breaking in to read it. So I'd rather keep it here, if it's all the same to you.

Well CHRISTMAS IS OVER! I hope you all survived it satisfactorially. If anyone's up for buying me a present I'd like a nice-natured and chirpy peach-faced lovebird complete with luxury cage. Oh, and a new copy in hardback of the latest edition of Goodwin and Jamison's Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, only £71.25 from Amazon. (I'm writing my own book on moods. Hence my meticulous observations on my own...)

Well I must go. Good night all!