Rapid cycling, depression, mania, mixed, it's everything! Blaughhhhh

My eyes are completely burning. I realized I haven’t posted much other than poetry for awhile now so here I am. I have a headache. It’s been a really long day. This may be partially incoherent. I’ve been prefacing a lot of my interactions with people that way lately. Oh well.

So I think it’s safe to say that I have been up for a large portion of the last 6 months. Which is all well and good with me, and in ways is enjoyable. But now, it’s starting to go into this rapid cycling/mixed type stuff, which is not so enjoyable. However, it is reality, so I figured I should document it.

A few months ago my husband and I separated again. Then in January, I started school again. So, there has been a lot of stress and just a lot of demands on me physically and mentally. So that’s just a quick background leading to today.

Stuff is sort of a big jumbled ball right now. One minute I’m bouncing around with the energy of 10 men (ok, women) and the next I’m tired and dazed. For a few days I’ll get very little sleep and be just fine and dandy, and then it switches and I will barely have the energy to get through the day without falling asleep, and on top of that, when I do sleep, it will feel like I could KEEP sleeping for a whole week or more. The constant energy fluctuations are hell on me.

One day I’ll be talking to everyone who crosses my path and listening to everyone’s stories and the next day (literally, the next day) I’ll be sullen and walk into class and not say one word to a soul. I’ll just want to sit and wallow and ruminate. But then hours later, or the next day, I pop up again, and will be laughing and jumping and all of that crazy stuff.

I go from being able to concentrate well in class and “get” the material to being completely distracted, unable to concentrate at all, finding the material confusing and getting bogged down by it, and then stuff just falls through the cracks.

Now the ups I certainly like. But I DON’T like the downs mixed in there. In fact, the fact they are even there at all is kind of starting to make me a bit angry. Also the constant flip/flip/flip like a metronome is starting to wear on me. On top of it, I think I’m starting to notice a few psychotic type things happening and so that is raising a red flag to me. In the past, when I have had longer periods of mania that have psychotic elements, it kind of has the same pattern. Things begin to rise and then I just become more erratic to the point where everything gets confused and meshed together and it becomes hard to distinguish. I visualize it as a ladder, and each day I go up and down the steps and can be at any height at any time not only day to day, but throughout the day as well.

So, lately, I have had the idea of meds on the brain off and on. I really really do not want to take them. So I’m holding out to see if I can manage another couple of months. Once May hits my stress load will lower dramatically because I will be out of school for the summer and I’m sure that will help some.

This wasn’t super detailed because I really just am too tired and headachy to think much. But, wanted to explain a bit of what’s been going on recently. I know my videos have been fluctuating between depressed/rambling/dejected and overly happy/hyper so this was just my quick explanation of recent events.

Memory Lapses, Time Distortion and Cognitive Impairment in Bipolar/BPD & Mental Illness

As I mentioned, I’ve been in an altered state for a while, having all the multitude of things that go along with it. It’s like your world gets flipped and stretched every which way. A couple posts back I mentioned the artistic wordless video I made of what the internal feelings are like, sensory wise. The shifting colors, time speeding/slowing, blackness, erratic moods. If you’re interested, you can view it HERE.

So, I’ve been having quite a few cognitive difficulties as well as memory issues currently. This occurs with both bipolar and BPD (which I have) but also other disorders such as schizophrenia and schizoaffective.

Some might describe it as forgetfulness, which is common, but it is more than that. It’s more like a complete blank, almost like a form of amnesia. I often find myself lately walking from point A to point B and standing there without a clue as to why I am there. Just this morning I went from the kitchen to the bathroom to get something. I stood in front of my robe thinking, is this what I needed? I couldn’t figure it out. I reached in the pocket. Was it chap stick I needed? I couldn’t remember. I just stood there with a total black backdrop in my head. I couldn’t for the life of me remember at all. I decided to just go back to the kitchen. Then I remembered what I needed and went back and got it. The ironic this is, writing this now, it’s only a couple hours later and I CAN’T REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS :/ That’s how bad it is! It happens dozens of times a day, over and over and over and is incredibly frustrating.It's as if once I get to where I'm going, I have no memory or reference point at all.

Similarly related is the feeling of having time distortion. It generally goes along with the memory lapses. I know that I have had conversations with people the last few days but I don’t remember them at all or I remember just bits randomly. I just talked to someone on the phone yesterday and said “Did I already text you that?” I was sure I hadn’t. They said I did. I didn’t remember it at all even though it apparently was a few minutes prior. Later that night I thought about that conversation. I was looking through my phone, and many of the numbers I couldn’t remember even getting the calls, whether they were missed calls or had messages on them. I found the phone call of that conversation. I had thought we only talked maybe 4 or 5 minutes, just quickly in passing. The record said 19 minutes. 19 minutes? What on earth did we say for 19 minutes? I honestly don’t know. It weirds me out so much knowing there is no memory of it. I only recall maybe 2 or 3 sentences that were said. I’ve been puzzling over it but there is no answer, just a strange sort of amnesia there, like the blackness I mentioned before.

I know this all has to do with our limbic system and the complex way that structures like the amygdala and hippocampus work together. Often, outsiders (meaning people without these types of mental issues) will say things like “Oh everyone has that sometimes.” I know what they mean, because yes, everyone is forgetful at times. But not everyone has amnesia for their day to day events, and I have enough insight to realize that this is a distortion of time, place and memory, again, related to happenings within the limbic system and likely other parts of the brain as well.

People often believe that “mood disorders” like bipolar are simply emotion related, but that is untrue. They also involve, as I mentioned: sensation, perception, memory, behavior. Just goes to show how complex our brain is and how many structures interact to form what we consider “normal” or “abnormal” manifestations of behavior and consciousness.

People have mentioned that when they are altered time can seem to speed up or slow down. It is the same for me. I lose track of the day and time completely sometimes. Yesterday, the day of the above mentioned call, I know I was at home with my son for hours but can’t recall if I did anything. I know I watched him playing for a good 3 hours. But the rest of the hours somehow passed without me really being able to recall what events occurred. The things themselves become blurry or disappear and sometimes even the chronological order in which things happen seems to become muddled. I sometimes find I do not know what day it is (Monday, Wednesday, etc.) or even what month it is! I find myself looking outside puzzling over whether it’s June or October despite the fact there is snow on the ground.

The perception of things shifts. A few days back when putting my son to bed, I sat outside his room while he fell asleep (we’re working on getting him to fall asleep alone, without me sitting with him.) I was looking at the carpet and recall how it was almost like a strange hallucination. The carpet appeared to be shimmering, like someone had sprinkled glitter all over it, even though I was sitting in dim lighting. It also appeared to be shaking slightly, a light “quivering” motion like waves of static on a TV or small waves on the ocean (the motion, not the color or appearance.)

It really stinks because we all need an “anchor” to keep us rooted just in our day to day lives. Date/time/place/events, these things give us a reference point for other things. When the reference points become mixed or start disappearing it can make it difficult to make sense of anything.