serotonindrip

[serotonindrip]

Late night thoughts

Between my ever changing mood swings, my highs and my lows, the few and far between moments of pure euphoric moods, to the darkest of times, I wish I could explain to my family and friends how I feel.

If anyone in my family has Bipolar Disorder, they have never had a formal diagnosis. They don’t believe in mental illness and find it a huge joke. Funny that they all seem to have an addiction to something in their lives. Whether a pill, alcohol, or something stronger. 

My bipolar rage is something I have dealt with for years, even before that diagnosis. I lash out when I get angry. I take it out on those who don’t deserve it. I can’t help it. My family doesn’t believe that. Hell, when I was hospitalized for a suicide attempt, they didn’t take it seriously. Thought it was all for attention, and the bulimia? Well that was a huge joke to them. Attention seeking they would say.

I have all this anger built up inside of me and I don’t know how to channel it. I still partake in self-harm and purging. It makes me feel so good in the moment, and then the guilt rushes in. 

My friends are supportive. Really, they are. But they don’t understand, how could they? They don’t have Bipolar, they don’t know how it feels to go from one extreme to the other. I can be in a room full of people, yet I still feel so alone. 

Patiently waiting for this depressive episode to end. Just a moment of feeling normal. But at the same time, I’m craving a manic episode. God how I miss them. Sometimes I just want to flush my meds down the toilet.

Sometimes I just want to pack a bag and get on a bus and leave everything. Not tell anyone I’m leaving. I just want to disappear from this town and not look back. Honestly, I don’t even know what’s stopping me.

[serotonindrip]

August 22, 2008

A background story that leads to my diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder. If anyone even stumbles upon this post, there may be triggers in here for some readers. I apologize for any grammatical or spelling errors, I am typing this on my phone on my lunch break.

It was a Friday, my second week of my junior year in high school. School was out for the day for a teacher development day. My mother woke me up around 9 o’clock in the morning to show me pictures of my cousin who was born earlier that morning. I gave generic comments you say about new babies and rolled over in the bed, desperate to take advantage of no school. My mom gently shook my shoulder and told me to get up, that she needed to tell me something. I brushed her hand off and tried to focus on falling back asleep. She shook my shoulder again, more forcefully this time. “Please get up.” I heard the crack in her voice and turned over to look at her. I asked her what was wrong. “I’m so sorry,” tears were falling at this point and I started to feel the anxiety build, “Your daddy passed away last night.”

“Your daddy passed away last night.”

The sentence replayed in my head over and over again. I asked my mom, “What? What do you mean?” She repeated the sentence. I remember jumping out of the bed and backing into the wall. “No, no, no, no,” I kept telling her. And as she kept telling me how sorry she was and trying to hold me, the no’s turned into screams. I crumbled to the ground and kept screaming no. I remember my grandmother and cousin rushing into the room and my mother told them what had happened. The voices seemed a hundred miles away.

June 16th, 2008 was the last time I saw my dad. I got mad at him for some reason, a reason I can’t remember. June 17th, 2008, my dad called and wished me a happy birthday and told me he loved me. That was the last time I talked to him. Ten years later, that guilt still eats away at me. He tried to communicate with me, and I always ignored his calls.

My dad was sick. Something my mom constantly told me as a way to get me to talk to him. Looking back, I wish I did. But I was a stupid teenager and didn’t want to hear it. My dad was a functioning alcoholic, he drank his fair share of beer plus more, but was able to hold a job. He got hurt on the job and that’s when his spiral into addiction started. Something I didn’t know at the time. When he passed, I knew he had cirrhosis of the liver and Hepatitis C. At the time of his death, that’s what I believed he had died from. It wasn’t until January 6th, his birthday, of the following year, that I found out he had died of a heroin overdose.

After my dad passed, I went into my first major depressive episode. I pushed all of my friends and family away. I would come home from school and do my homework and then go to bed. I developed bulimia and I started cutting again. Something I had been doing on and off since I was 11. With each week, the cuts got deeper and deeper. No one noticed. I hid them well. After each meal, I would disappear into the bathroom and purge. No one noticed. The purging and cutting felt so good. Because I actually felt something. I was numb for so long after my dad passed away, but every time I would cut into my skin, or shove my finger down my throat, I would feel a sense of relief, even if it only lasted for a few minutes, it felt so damn good to feel something.

It was the worst depression episode I had experienced so far. I had been dealing with depression since I was a small child, but not a single one of those episodes came close to how I felt during this one.

One day the sadness disappeared. Anger took its place. I felt a rage deep down inside of me. I was angry at my dad for leaving me. I was angry at myself for ignoring him. I was angry at my mom for delivering the worst news of my life. I was angry at my family for not understanding how I felt. I was angry at God and began to question his existence. I had anger inside of me for so long that it became the only friend I knew.

It all changed on my dad’s birthday. I skipped school that day so I could go to my dad’s grave and visit for the first time since his passing. I was on Facebook and saw that my older cousin had posted something about my dad. Someone I didn’t know commented on it saying they didn’t know he had passed away and asked what happened. My cousin replied back, “He overdosed in Florida.”

I read it over and over again. I felt something inside of me break. I felt something deep inside of me change. In that moment, I felt so betrayed. It was my dad’s own actions that caused his death and wasn’t able to quite grasp my mind around it yet.

The days following my dad’s birthday, I suddenly had more energy. I was still angry, yes, but for the first time in a long time, I felt good. I started talking to my friends again, going out with them, and I became more reckless. I started stealing money from my family and would buy things I didn’t need or necessarily want. I started driving my car at high speeds for the thrill of it, gaining a couple of speeding tickets while I was it. I felt on top of the world. I didn’t have the need for sleep anymore. I would stay up for days at a time, crash, and repeat. Looking back, this was my first manic episode. I had the textbook symptoms of a manic episode, but I didn’t understand what was actually happening.

The sleep deprivation finally took its toll on me. The more days I went without sleep, the more I would hallucinate. I began hearing these voices. They would tell me things I didn’t want to hear. They picked at everything from my appearance to how my family felt about me. I would try to sleep just so I wouldn’t hear the voices, but they were still there in my nightmares. I wasn’t sleeping, eating, or doing much of anything anymore. The voices started telling me how worthless I was, and how everyone would be better off without me. I started to believe them. So I started to plan my suicide.

I wrote the letter out and shoved it in my backpack. I went downstairs and ate dinner with my family and excused myself to the bathroom afterwards. I threw it up, naturally, and looked through the medicine cabinet. I opened a few bottles and poured them into my hands and then went up to my room and took them.

I don’t exactly remember what I took, it was mainly a mix of Tylenol PM and NyQuil. It only made me sick to my stomach for a couple of days, and at the point I had been up for three days straight and I grew hysterical. I wanted to die so badly that I grew angry at myself for not being able to commit suicide. I could hear the voices laughing at me and I felt so embarrassed. I was up for two more days and finally broke down and told the therapist at school what I had done.

I was sent to an adolescent behavioral unit and spent a month there. That was when I received my diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder.

Ten years later Bipolar has become a part of my everyday life. Some days are good and some days are bad. I try to take each day as they come, but it can get pretty difficult occasionally. My mood swings are something my friends accept and understand, for which I’m beyond grateful for. Because I know how hard it is to deal with me at times.

I’m currently having mixed episodes due to my mother recently overdosing. I started this blog as a way to get my thoughts and feelings out of my head. I’m back on mood stabilizers and I hope I start to feel normal sometime soon. It’s going to be a battle that’s for sure, but I hope this blog helps. I’m so tired of keeping everything to myself. I want to be able to get my emotions out.

If anyone reads this, thank you for your time. I mainly did this for myself, but it if you find it, thank you for reading my story.