Welcome

Welcome to my blog! I’m excited you found me. I have started this blog as a way to document my journey through Bipolar 2 manic depressive disorder. I have been dealing with this my whole life, but was only diagnosed at 36 years old. My hope with this is to help others with this not feel alone, as I did for so many years and to help family members who are trying to cope with the diagnosis of their loved one. I plan to share my manic episodes, hypo manic episodes, as well as my depressive episodes. Along the way I will also periodically add in the ways I manage and respond to these episodes, as well as the safety plan my family has in place for each of these episodes as the vary greatly.

Been A While!

So it’s been a while since I’ve been here. A lot of that is attributed to my crazy mood swings and depression. We had to remove one medication and it’s helped very little. I don’t do well on mood stabilizers and anti-depressants, however the depression is still pretty relevant in my life. Will it ever completely go away? That’s a great question that no one has an answer for. I’ve found some relief with essential oils and my ferret baby, who always seems to know when I need extra snuggles. I still haven’t found work and I’m sure that’s a bit of the problem. Honestly, my doctor doesn’t think I’d keep a job very long if I did find one, only because I’m not as stable as we would like. It’s discouraging, but this journey is a trail and error sort of thing. It totally sucks, but that’s the life I live with Bipolar Disorder. My fiance and children have been amazing as well. They completely tolerate my crazy, fly off the handle, and often times, mean and hateful rants and will usually just smile at me and talk me down out of the rage fit. It really is awful. They don’t deserve that at all. I hate that there are days that even medicated I can’t control myself. Often times, I feel like they don’t need me around, no I’m not suicidal, not in the least. Generally, I feel like I should leave them and move away. My go to has always been to run away rather than face the obstacles in front of me. I’m learning to face them, but that’s so scary and hard for me. I know it is the healthy and right thing to do, so why is it so hard? I guess only in time will I find that answer.

Well, I guess that’s it for today, but I’ll be back soon as I have a doctor’s appointment coming up and hopefully I’ll have some more answers to some of these questions.

Radical Acceptance

Accepting something for what it is.

I had a really hard time with this in my group program. It’s basically accepting something for what it is and knowing you don’t have to like it but you accept it… Kind of like the saying goes… It is what it is. Once you master that skill everything else falls into place.

It’s been amazing to finally be able to deal with everything life throws at me in a much healthier way!

Accepting The Hard Stuff

That’s probably the hardest part of having Bipolar Disorder. Accepting that I have Bipolar Disorder wasn’t easy and it’s taken me a while to finally come to terms with it. While in my DBT (diabolical behavior therapy) I learned some very important tools to deal with life in general. The one that helped the most was Radical Acceptance. Accepting something for what it is no matter how you feel about it. You accept it and start dealing with it so it’s not holding you back. For me it was the death of two loved ones in a span of two weeks. I never grieved and just through myself into a million different projects, never completing a single one. I heard the radical acceptance piece 2 or 3 times before I actually believed it would help. I finally had to deal with that before I could deal with my diagnosis. No I’m not thrilled with my loses, but I also know there was NOTHING I could do. I blamed myself, I tried to convince myself I could have done this or that and prevented it, but the reality is and always was that there was NOTHING I could have done to stop the laws of life. Now that I have grieved and realized that life happens and we don’t always agree with it, I was able to heal and move forward.

Now on to accepting my diagnosis…… That one still hasn’t happened completely, but I am definitely getting there. No one wants to have a mental illness or any other chronic health issue, but it is what it is. I was constantly saying, I’ll never get better, my life is over, no one will want me, I’ll never be loved. While the whole time my boyfriend and children were all here supporting me. My family was too. I had to actually set boundaries because some of them were way to supportive, calling every day texting me multiple times a day and it was getting overwhelming. I’ve learned through radical acceptance that it’s okay to hate the diagnosis as long as I am doing everything possible to live my life to the fullest and be stable.

I have even started looking for a job. I’ve never felt better in my life. do I like having to take a bunch of medications every day? Nope not at all, but I do because they help me feel better and literally help me function to my fullest. do I still have good days and bad days? Yes, but they are not way over the top good or way over the top bad. I can deal with them and I’m aware of when they happen and we’ve put safety plans in place in case they are bad. We’ve educated the kids on what to look for and when they notice it who to talk to about it and how to handle it if they are the only ones home.

Radical acceptance has helped all of us. It’s not easy and it really is something most people know and practice but never knew it was a thing people struggle with. I accepted the deaths but still hadn’t really accepted them. I would dwell on them for weeks and months and it finally hit me….. I can’t move on until I take the time to heal from this. I’ve been able to teach people these skills and really help them and in turn it helps me.

The Past Few Weeks!

I’ve been spending the last few weeks with my grandmother and it was amazing having her here! I had several bad days and having her here to talk to and help with the kids and housework was great. She left yesterday and to everyone’s surprise, I handled it very well. Yes I was sad, but not severely depressed.

My bad days these past couple of weeks haven’t really been that bad either. I tried to isolate a couple of times and no one was having it. My mood stabilizers have finally found the magic number to keep my manic episodes in check so tomorrow we start the increase in the antidepressant and see where that needs to be to get that part in check.

Next week I’m hoping to be discharged from my outpatient therapy and get back to working. I’ve been job searching a lot since I have no job to go back to, because I quit during a severe depressive state back in May. While quitting was not the best option and I realize that now I just have to keep looking. Two days after I quit on Mother’s day I went into a manic episode that lasted almost a month……And then came the start of my episode requiring my hospitalization. I saw my outpatient psychiatrist a few weeks ago and the first thing she said to me was how have you lived this long with no proper diagnosis and only ever had this one hospitalization. The only answer I had was, I don’t know, but I’m glad I have. She said that most people have multiple hospitalizations before being diagnosed and all I can say is I’ve been dealing with it so long that it became a way of life. Fight my butt off to pick myself up each and every time and never bother anyone with how I was feeling. For those of you that think hiding is the answer I’m here to tell you it’s not. Speak up, talk to your family if they don’t want to hear it (and trust me mine didn’t at first either), talk to a close friend, find a mental illness group meeting, find an online group, something somewhere to help you work through the episodes, but especially TALK TO YOUR DOCTOR! Be honest and complete with all of your symptoms and moods. I downloaded a mood tracker on my phone and every night it asks me how my day was. No one sees it but me. I can then show it to my doctors and therapist and have an accurate account of my moods between visits. I love that I can be in control and be an active participant in my care.

Am I OK yet? No, but I am better and my moods are stabilizing. I hope one day I can say, yes I am OK, but for now I’ll stick with I am better and get a little better everyday. I fight a little less to find that happy place I know I have within me each day and that makes a world of difference. I have new coping skills and outlets that help make those bad days easier to handle and people are noticing. I get to teach people about the skills I’ve learned and how much they have helped me. This whole thing is a learning process and with that comes retraining my brain with baby steps like I would be teaching a baby to roll over, sit up, crawl, walk, eat of a spoon and that doesn’t happen overnight!

Just know you can get better and there is a lot of support out there. You just have to find it. Mental Illness is a stigma the world needs to talk about and I won’t give up hope that some day it will be normal to talk about and the stigma will be gone.

When I was first diagnosed as having Bipolar Disorder, I would always say I’m Bipolar. That’s so not true. Now I try to say, I have Bipolar Disorder, it is my illness and it does not for one second define who I am. I am me……maybe not the me everyone once knew, but a much better and stronger person and I don’t want to be the old me. There will be people who don’t like me now and that’s fine with me. If you can’t understand that the old me was broken and needed fixing and that’s what I’m doing then you have no business being in my life!

 

This Week

So this week has been rough. I started out pretty manic Monday morning and by lunch I was really depressed. There was no real reason that I can even think of. By dinner I was irritated and angry. Tuesday was even worse. I woke up feeling good by 10am I was ready to fight. By about 12pm I was on top of the world. I was full of energy and ready to take on the world. By 4pm I was trying to end a 2 year relationship for no real good reason other than my mood swings were making me irrational. My boyfriend has been amazing this far and obviously wasn’t going to take me leaving for an answer. We fought for like 2 and 1/2 hours because I was so sure I was done with this relationship. In reality I am by far done with it and have no real desire to walk away. Being manic makes me feel invincible, being depressed makes me feel like I’m worthless…. Cycling through them so quickly makes me so unsure of myself and my relationships that often times my flight or fight kicks in and for me I’d rather just run. It’s what I’ve always done, it’s what always worked, or so I thought. It never helped and it never made any situation any better. I’ve been in an outpatient DBT group therapy program for about 3 weeks and while I’m far from stable with the meds I am a lot better with dealing with stressors. There are still times when I feel the need to run from an argument or walk away because I feel like I’m going to blow up over something so small it shouldn’t matter. I’ve learned to let whom ever I am having the problem with know I need some space and that we will resolve whatever the conflict is when I calm down. I have been meditating every day and that has really helped too. It’s all about communicating and using the skills most of us know but never think about them. My favorite skill to work on is Mindfulness and just staying in the moment. There’s no reason to worry about 10 minutes ago you can’t change that and there’s no reason to worry about 10 minutes from now….. It hasn’t happened yet!

I’ll be back in a few days with lots more goodies from DBT! Always remember relapse is always a thing. You never know what might trigger it so always be aware of even slight changes. The person you love may not even realize they are closer to relapse than think. Be your lived ones advocate and help them monitor their behavior. It might just save their life.

Remember 25% of people diagnosed with any form of Bipolar Disorder take their own lives. We need to stop the stigma and start communicating.

More about my past

Growing up I always knew I was different. I had major mood swings almost daily from the time I was 11. I’d be happy one day and really sad the next. For me that was what I thought was normal. I figured all girls went through this and it would pass. I thought oh it’s just pms. It might have been at first. I definitely noticed more mood swings the closer it got my cycle days so we shrugged it off forever. Literally forever. My childhood was by no means bad both my parents loved me and really were amazing. I found out that my father wasn’t my biological father early on. It wasn’t really a big secret and I never thought he wasn’t my dad. He raised me like his own and that was that. When I got pregnant with my first child at 16 both my parents were supportive in my choices to keep her and helped me whenever I needed. That should have been one of the happiest days of my life and all I could do was cry. I never pushed her away, but I knew something wasn’t right with me. They called it the baby blues. For me it was much more than that. I took all the meds they forced on me and eventually started feeling better. They pushed me to finish high school and walk across the stage with my class. That was the best feeling ever, but yet again I couldn’t be happy. I just didn’t know how. I knew if I were to get happy and excited a couple days later I’d be in bed so depressed nothing would get done. In the years that followed my children’s father and I had 2 more children and had an on again off again marriage. I’d leave a couple months later come back. That went on for 3 years. I finally just called my best friend to come get me. 6 months pregnant and 2 girls under 4, I was a mess. We got divorced and have been pretty amicable up to this point. We both moved on. We coparented well for awhile and then I’d go off on some tangent and we wouldn’t talk at all. I got remarried and divorced yet again. I swore I’d never do it again and then someone from my past came back into my life and I thought this is finally my chance to be happy…. Yeah that didn’t happen either. We got married and 3 months later I was flying back home with my mother. Yet another divorce. Come to find out that’s part of my bipolar behavior. I make really bad decisions when I’m manic. When I’m depressed I don’t usually leave my house so I don’t have to worry about that. When I’m manic I have a tendency to make bad choices about the men I’m with. It all makes sense now. I never saw a connection until recently when talking with my doctor. I’m actually very grateful that those choices didn’t lead up to anything bad. I’ve only recently found meds that make me feel good 80% of the time. My manic episodes are manageable and the depression is still there, but the mood swings are finally better. Eventually the antidepressant will be increased but we need to get the mood stabilizers at a constant dose first. I’m still pretty messed up mostly because I haven’t really accepted that I could get to the point where I could actually take my own life. I know that I need to for my own well-being but that’s the hard part. Never in all these years did I think I would ever try to take my own life, but I tried and that is scary.

Update to my last post

In my last post I stated that family drama pushed me over the edge. I want to clarify that I do not blame any of them for the choices I made leading up to my hospitalization. Merely, that those actions were too much for me to handle. I had known for several months my meds weren’t working and I made no effort to fix that because they’ve always worked for awhile then stopped. I figured I’d just deal like I always have. That was my first mistake. The second was not realizing I was in trouble and asking for help. I have taken full responsibility for my actions and the way I dealt with them. I’m still working on forgiving myself, but I will get there someday.

How it all started….

I started out with anxiety and depression when I was 12 or 13. I never did much about it, because that just wasn’t something we talked about. We were always told those feelings were best kept ourselves. When I turned 18, I knew something was wrong. I went to the doctor and told them my symptoms…. I was diagnosed with major depression and the meds would help and the anxiety would subside. Never once did I mention my constantly changing moods or the highs and lows I was having. Big mistake on my part I suppose. I had a diagnosis and I was happy with or so I thought. In the years since then I’ve been on more meds than I count to only treat two of the symptoms. Some worked for awhile then quit, but most never did. I forever thought that was going to be my life. Trying new meds and suffering through the depression. The depression was horrible. I couldn’t get out of bed. I didn’t cook or clean and I barely did the minimum when it came to my children. When I wasn’t depressed I was on life. I cooked, I cleaned, and I took better care of my children. I noticed my meds weren’t working so great in February or March of this year. I never talked to my doctor about because I figured how many more pills can they offer to help me. I continued my normal life had a job that I loved, but on Mother’s Day of this year I snapped. I had bad day at work and brought it all home. All 3 my children were here and as I walked in they all said Happy Mother’s Day Mama, how was work? I flipped out and told them work was horrible and slammed my bedroom door. I needed to cry and didn’t want them to see. My boyfriend and the kids had planned out this amazing dinner for me and all I wanted to do was be alone. I ended up quitting that job that night. Had I been rational, I would have talked to my manager and tried to find away to keep my but also de-stress and take care of me. My son left June 1st to spend the summer with his dad and my daughter followed June 29th. This had been planned for almost 6 months. I knew they were going and thought I could handle them being gone. Now let’s fast forward to July 16th, the week before I felt fantastic. My house was clean, my laundry was done (which hadn’t been for a couple weeks). Nothing could bring me down….. Or so I thought. There was this huge fight between my children’s stepmother and my mother that just sent me I to a downward spiral. I decided for whatever reason I was gonna have a few beers. I did that pretty often on weekends both when I’ve been manic as well as being depressed although at the time I had no idea that’s what was going on. I was really sad and still pretty manic so the emotions I was feeling were like nothing I’ve ever experienced. I’ve never been both at the same time. By this time it’s 2:30 in the morning. I just had enough and was done. I text my best friend and told her I needed her to take of my kids, they were going to need her. I text my daughter and told her to take care of her brother for me, he was going to need her. The last text I remember reading was “mommy you aren’t leaving us, you can’t.” I remember throwing my phone and thinking this is it, I can’t do this anymore. I grabbed a knife and was ready to be done. My phone rang about 15 times and I ignored it. One of those calls was from my daughter the other from my best friend. All of this happening while my boyfriend is sleeping because I didn’t want to wake him since I knew he had to work. About 20 minutes later with the knife on my wrist, the doorbell rang, it was the police department, which did not wake my boyfriend. I remember thinking I have 2 choices, drop the knife or answer the door or they would break the door down. I sat there for a moment thinking about which choice I was going to make still thinking I wanted to be dead. I dropped the knife and answered the door. Through all of the tears and all of the anger somewhere deep down I knew the choice I made was the right one. After spending about a half hour hour talking with the police they asked me if I wanted to go the hospital. I knew I was going whether I went willingly or not. I decided willingly was the way to go. I woke my boyfriend to tell him the police were here and I’m going to the hospital. The look of horror on his face was something I never want to see again. He had no idea what had just transpired in the next room. When I got to the hospital everything I had was taken from me. I had an amazing emergency room nurse who charged my dead phone and brought it to me so I could let my boyfriend know where I was. I spent 14 hours in this emergency room with no windows nothing but a tv that was encased with plexiglass. I’d never been to the hospital before so I had no idea what was going to happen. Eventually I agreed to be admitted to see if they could help me. I spoke with a Dr at about 3am on Tuesday morning who decided I was severely depressed. When I spoke to the psychiatrist that same day around 11am, I couldn’t stop talking. Everything I had been hiding for so long just spilled out like word vomit. I kept thinking shut up, shut up none of that matters. After about 25 mins I was done spilling everything, I remember him looking at me and saying, “you are bipolar, that’s why none of these things were working. The meds I had been taking were working against each other and eventually led to this episode. Had I been more open and honest with my doctors all those years ago maybe this nightmare never would have happened. I remember thing great now I have a label and everyone is going to know I have bipolar disorder. I was sad, but also relieved. I know knew why I was always feeling this way. When I was released from the hospital, I had therapy sessions already set up for me as well as all my psychiatric appointments and one on one counseling. I thought great all I have to do is go to these things and I’ll be better. Let me tell you the group therapy program I am in is no walk in the park and I have to make changes within myself to be better. More about all of that in my next post.