Friday, September 17, 2010

Still trying to make sense of bipolar diagnosis - want to go back to life as it was


A brief update – went to see my psychiatrist yesterday. I told her what was going on and she said she wasn’t sure if I was rapid cycling or not. I guess only time will tell. She didn’t really agree with my counselor about the mixed state, she said that she thought it was a part of the mania I’ve recently been experiencing. Ugh. Who knows! Just one more confusing thing. It’s like, where does one thing stop and another begin? There is no line of demarcation. It’s all miscellaneous criteria that is written down in a manual by people who do not experience these things and therefore, how much could they really know? Maybe it really doesn’t mean anything at all. Again, who knows. I could go back and forth all day.

She agreed that my meds probably were not working well and that I should go back on the anti-psychotic meds…I can’t go back to Risperdal, although it worked well, because of side effects. So now, starting today I am trying Seroquel. It’s supposed to be sedating, just like Risperdal. We’ll see if I can handle it or if it makes a difference.

As you can tell I’ve started video blogging too, I’m digging watching other people’s stuff on YouTube also. It’s so helpful to know others are out there experiencing the same stuff. And knowing others can relate to my situation also feels good…I know I’m not totally alone.

I’m not sure when the next time I’ll post will be. In a way all this talking is helping me but in other ways I feel like I’m going around in a circle. I talk to my psychiatrist, my counselor, people around me, then there are my own thoughts to contend with…it tends to add to the confusion rather than simplify. I’ve been having a lot of conflicting thoughts today, one being that I feel the diagnosis of bipolar is really starting to define me, and I don’t want that. I had a lot of “normalcy” in my life before about a year ago…it wasn’t like I was in a perpetual state of confusion and flux. I want to go back to that. I wouldn’t have even gotten treatment had it not been for my spiral out of control. I always dealt with things myself, and that’s pretty much what I want to do again, just take things out of other peoples hands and put them back into my own.

I get so caught up in going to doctors every week or two that it doesn’t help much…in fact I feel like I’m talking so much I’m only making myself worse! Everyone tells you “monitor your moods” and “pay attention to warning signs” and all this other stuff, and it’s sort of like, you have to be on constant guard and I don’t like it. I mean really, what’s the deal with being a little “up” or a little “down”? I think that unless I’m so up that I’m literally “off the map” as my psychiatrist says, or so depressed I want to kill myself, that I should just forget about everything else and go about my life. A part of me doesn’t even want to keep taking meds. I want to just remove this label of bipolar and return to the time when I was contently ignorant. I want to return to my life as I knew it. Ahhhhh…I could go on forever. But I won’t :)

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