Confucious Says...

There are times in one's life when you sit back and wonder how you got to where you are; sometimes it seems as if the road was a slowly-travelled one, with twists and turns, and other times it seems as if it was just a straight ride down hill, taking very little time and making you hold on with both hands.

I'm not sure which of those got me where I am: probably a combination of both. But just when I thought things couldn't get more ... interesting, they did.

My therapist has been pushing the diagnosis of bipolar disorder on me with disturbing frequency; I was aware of this right from the beginning, as comorbid diagnoses are common. However he said that I was exhibiting "cyclothemic bipolar", which is just a mild form of the disorder, and I thought, hey, I can deal with that. I was already taking medication to control depression and impulse control for the Borderline Personality Disorder, and the medications would cross over into the Bipolar Disorder. Ok, no problem. I don't LIKE the label, but if he wants to write that on his little yellow chart, we'll just go ahead and let him, since my insurance company will pay for therapy for Bipolar Disorder but NOT BPD therapy. This strikes me as ludicrous since therapy has proven helpful for BPD at a much higher percentage rate than it does for Bipolar Disorder, which is generally a chemically treated disorder.

Well, it turns out, the therapist was right~~and wrong. I am bipolar, but not cyclothemic. I've spent the past six weeks fighting tooth and nail to pull myself out of a depressive cycle that continues to suck me down in ways that I never dreamed possible. How can one's outlook continue to look so bleak when you have EXACTLY the same things you had six months ago? Have you heard those cheesy commercials where they say, "depression hurts"? It does. Damn, it does. I ache inside, and outside. My muscles have become knotted to an extent that my massage therapist has not experienced before. I keep going, she keeps working, and just keeps saying, "this is something I have not seen....". My chiropractor keeps working and looks at me with pity in his face. I hate pity. I know he cares. He pats my shoulder and tells me to come back when I need to. He does what he can but the long and the short of it is that no one seems to be able to do anything that makes a significant difference, and I just don't know WHY.

My therapist says that I'm not even in the bottom zone yet. The bottom zone, or "black" zone, is suicidal, when all thoughts of life and finding it worthy, are finished. I'm currently in the "brown" zone. Whoopy. What I don't get...is why.

WHY? I don't want to be like this. I don't want to feel the clenching fear of abandonment; I don't want to feel the tightening of depression in my guts; I don't want to feel the knotting of muscles in the base of my skull as the headaches come, day after day. I don't want to sit in my room for hours on end, loathe to come out and speak....because I don't know when it will end.

I thought this was as bad as it would get. But I was wrong; this weekend it got worse. The joy of medications has smacked me in the head in a way that is just so terribly, horrifically ironic:

It's taking my ability to speak coherently. The side effects sheet lists this as "general cognitive impairment", which usually means you cannot think of the correct word to use in a certain sentence.
For example, last night as I sat and cried, I was telling my husband how this could affect me, as I was getting ready to coach an all-star team of young men, and mentioned that my ability to speak clearly and concisely was important, as it would be the first thing that started to form their initial ________ of me. I wanted to portray a certain ________. For the life of me, as I sat and stared him in the face, I could NOT come up with the word, "image". Simple word ... but it was just not there. And this happens several times on a daily basis. But it got WORSE. By GOD, it got WORSE.

Rather than just not being able to find the words I wanted, suddenly, the WRONG words were coming out! I would think something, and when I went to say it, something absolutely different was coming out. "We're having nachos for dinner; do you think that's a good clearance"? WTF? I don't know how many times that happened this weekend. But for someone like me, who's spent her entire life with COMMUNICATION of the LANGUAGE as her greatest pride, this is truly, truly, a devastating blow.

And it continues: shortly before I completely lost my mind and freaked out, the words started coming out jumbled up. "That's what I think" comes out as "Think what I that". I've had enough.

So in typical BPD/bipolar fashion, I lost control, jumped up, ran out of the room, upstairs, slammed the bedroom door and stood in a corner for a while trying not to hyperventilate, and making deals with God. I spent the next 30 minutes after that sitting on the lid of the toilet, talking to my husband, who, bless his heart, desperately wants to help me, but is as helpless as I am.

In our family, we pride ourselves on our ability to communicate using the spoken word. Even BIG words. I've lost that. No big ones anymore. Just read this post, and the previous ones as a testament to that. It takes me back to a time that's equally as painful: my mother's illness and death.

She developed ALS~Lou Gerhig's Disease~in around 1987. She was a bright and animated woman with a gift for speech, and a writer. One of the first things to go was her ability to conduct interviews, as her speech became slurred when her tongue started to paralyze. That ended her writing career. From there, I shared her ride through the debilitating illness that eventually took her speech entirely, then her general muscle strength, and ability to swallow, walk, and breathe. A wretchedly unpleasant death.

So that's my weekend. And here I thought the clouds were finally lifting....I really did.