I have always lived in the extreme.
In terms of my thinking - it is very all or nothing, black and white. Things are or they aren't, the explanations are simple, not complicated. There is little room for interpretation. There is no in between, ever. It is either a success or a failure. It is only after having been in AA for a while that I have come to appreciate the varying shades of grey that is life sometimes and the fact that we do things for reasons that are complicated, that most things are complicated. That there are more than two sides to every story and that we may both be right.
And I also live in the extreme in terms of my mood, my emotions. I am up or I am down. Never in the middle, ever. It is only very recently that I have realized that I might not even know what in the middle is or what it feels like. I've been asking people to describe it to me - and what they describe is something I am utterly unfamiliar with.
If you've been reading this for any length of time, then you know how my mood sometimes changes on a dime. I don't always post about it, but I have. The way that I go from everything is wonderful to why am I alive at the drop of a hat. It is literally like flipping a switch. It is unpredictable and unexpected. The floor drops out from underneath me and I find myself in a place where I am unsure whether I can continue to live. And the next thing I know - everything is wonderful again.
When everything is wonderful - I feel great, I feel alive, I feel motivated, I am productive, energetic, I feel like I can do anything, sometimes I have a hard time sleeping, sometimes a hard time concentrating - I'm just trying to do too many things at once. Sometimes I can't shut my head off and it races like it is trying to do 25 things at once. And then on the flip side, I wonder why I am alive. I feel like nothing will ever be okay and that my life is pointless and everything is hopeless. I feel like I will not make it and like I cannot get myself out of it.
And so I go back and forth between these two extremes - sometimes it only takes 24 hours. I wake up with the everything is wonderful attitude and by the time I go to bed I am devastated and crying on the floor. Sometimes it is a 3 day cycle. Sometimes a few weeks. And I think I have had a few stretches that have been longer. It's hard to say really - I have been this way since I can remember so I would say since I was about 15. It is the only way I know how to live.
It has become predictable over the years, only in that I know that following an up will be a down, the down will involve something like a crash and that the higher the high, the lower the low.
I have resisted doing something about this until now. Just because. It's just the way that I am. Denial is a powerful thing.
Why now? Well, something changed. It happened just the way it did with drinking. I thought I had such great control over drinking (little did I know that exercising such extreme control over it is an alcoholic thing to do). And then one day, I just lost it- I lost the control that I had. It was gone, suddenly and without explanation I lost my ability to control how much I drank.
All these years I thought I had such excellent control over my mood - not that I had any control over it - but that I handled it well. Something happened and I don't know what, but my ability to handle it is gone. It has become intolerable. The up leaves me feeling totally out of control and so does the down. The up is too far up and the down has become dangerous. That's what has been going on these past several weeks that I have hardly posted. Emotional upheaval, realizations and trying to figure out what to do about it. What is the truth about this?
This may come as a surprise to the people who read this who know me. Because although they may know that I tend to fluctuate in terms of my emotions - I don't think anyone has ever been aware of just how extreme it really is sometimes. How extreme, or how dangerous. I have mostly lived alone for the past 10 years so no one really has a view into this part of me. No one is around to watch and because it changes so quickly and I don't always talk about it , in fact I talk about it very little, well, no one really knows what goes on with me.
Well, I was talking to someone about it, about my mood fluctuations, right in the midst of my apparent and sudden inability to deal with it - maybe being totally honest about it for the first time ever with anyone. I realized just how not normal it is - because see, I always thought that my up mood was the way that other people felt when they felt normal and happy - turns out it isn't. So to make a long story short, well, I am trying bipolar medication. My doctor says that what I describe is bipolar type II, but rapid or ultra ultra rapid cycling. I think I have always known this, but resisted being labeled. Probably because it is like being an alcoholic - it's a problem that does not go away, that only gets worse and that you have to do something about. And I can attest to the fact that yes, indeed, it has gotten worse over the years.
I did try 3 anti-depressants/anti-anxiety drugs in the past year for anxiety - two a year ago and one recently with the bipolar drug and I can't take them. We tried it originally because it was not obvious to the first doctor whether the up that I described was truly an up or just anxiety. Those drugs send me way up towards the manic side of things or make me borderline suicidal. My second doctor said yeah, those drugs do that to some bipolar people. So I can't take them.
And here's the thing - I said okay I'll try it - I think largely on the same theory that I went to AA on - sure I'll go to AA, I'll go to prove that I am not an alcoholic. Yeah, that wasn't what happened. So under that same theory, I said okay - thinking that the medication wouldn't work, I would be proven not to be bipolar and I could what? Go back to dealing with it cause it's the way I am and no medication can fix it? I don't know - I was too desperate to think that far ahead. Desperate. I was desperate for some relief from what was becoming dangerous and totally out of my control.
And shit people, the bipolar medication is working.
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