Upheaval

This is turning out to be quite a time of upheaval and change for me. I was thinking to myself just the other day how well I was handling it all. Well, that was a nice day. I should have known it was never going to last.

I think when all the change seemed very abstract and theoretical to me I could cope with it just fine but now that I've had some concrete lumps of inevitable fact dumped in my lap I'm freaking out just a little. So, what's changed?

Well, I confirmed the date I'm moving out of my current sublet and in with my brother and my nephew. Suddenly the thought of moving across to the other side of town seems scary and I'm panicking because I haven't used up all 10 of the yoga classes I paid for. In the few moments of rationality I'm afforded I recognise that there is nothing to stop me travelling back to this side of town to take a yoga class because really it's not that far and let's face it, I'm soon likely to have more free time on my hands.

I don't think I've itirated this at all in my blog yet but I'm going to be without work as of next Friday. My department is being folded into another department for the time being and so my services will no longer be required. I'd managed to push my impending unemployment to the back of my mind but now that it's steadily approaching I'm hitting panic mode. I had a job interview today which I think I tanked (group interview - revealed my weakness for not suffering fools) and I have another one on Thursday but there is still a distinct possibility that I might have no income in less than two weeks.

What I do know I'll be doing in two weeks is attending orientation at Deakin University where I've been accepted to study a Bachelor of Arts. I've been saying I wanted to go back to study for months but now that it's really happening I'm filled with feelings of dread and inadequacy. What happens if I'm not smart enough? What if everyone there hates me? What if the poverty I'll have to endure while studying drives me back to the brink?

I'm getting stress headaches just thinking about all of this. There have even been times this week when I've been so preoccupied that I've forgotten to eat. Me! Forget to eat!

What I need to do is practice some acceptance and commitment therapy and recognise that the panicky thoughts are not helping me. Then I need to commit to taking actions and thinking thoughts that are helpful and in line with my goals and values. In practical terms this means staying organised so that I don't get overwhelmed by any of the upcoming events, taking care of myself so getting good rest, eating well and regularly and attending yoga and lastly, reaching out to those around me to let them know this is likely to be a rough time and I might need help.

So there you are, you're forewarned, rough seas ahead. But hopefully once I've gone through this transition time it will all be smooth sailing.

Getting past the language

My first session with the new therapist was a success. Lucy is lovely and I found it really easy to talk to her, even as she was asking the probing questions about my life that a new therapist must ask. She was confident that we'd be able to work together to address the issues of guilt and anxiety that I specifically want to address and she even gave me a brand new diagnosis! Turns out I have a generalised anxiety disorder as well as bipolar disorder. Who knew?!

The only real downside is that Lucy is incredibly popular and I can't get in to see her again for another month. The upshot of this is that I have a month to do the homework she assigned to me. This might be for the best as one of the things I have to do is read a self-help book.

You might mistake me as the sort of person who gets in to self-help books. Certainly my ex-boyfriend's mother did and gave me one for Christmas one year (don't ever give somebody a self-help book as a gift, it's a strange kind of cruel). Truth is they make me roll my eyes into the back of my head and make gagging noises. It's the language! It's so dumbed-down and condescending. Plus I just don't buy into the idea that somebody has "the answer" for the very personal and unique predicaments I face and conveniently it's succinct enough to be put into a book.

So the book I'm set to read is called 'The Happiness Trap' (rolls eyes, makes gagging noises) and Lucy actually warned me that it was badly written. I've ordered the book online but the first chapter was free to download from the author's website. I'll spare you the ordeal of sharing any of it with you here but needless to say I turned into an eye rolling, gag-noise making machine as I waded through it.

The thing that's getting me is Lucy wants me to read this book and has acknowledged that it's poorly written but clearly there are some ideas in there that warrant attention. It's made me wonder if there are other things that could be helpful that I am missing out on because I don't appreciate the vehicle or the packaging for them. One prime example that comes to mind is exercise. I have now cancelled my gym membership due to poor attendance. I know that exercising regularly would be beneficial to my mental health but I really can't get in to the whole gym experience. Vitamins are another thing. I'm inclined to scoff at the world of natural medicine but other people swear by supplements they take.

It's unlikely I'll reconcile myself to self-help books, the gym or vitamins overnight but it has got me thinking that perhaps this recovering little mind of mine should be a bit more open rather than the tightly curled up little creature that it is.

Between starting this post and finishing it Lucy has had a cancellation so I'm off to see her tomorrow. Maybe she'll enlighten me some more on my close-mindedness.

Making Meaning

I read an article recently about finding meaning in your life when you have bipolar disorder. It has resonated with me as I have been feeling lately, even on my good days, that my life has become somewhat small and meaningless.

What I mean is that I used to have so many facets in my life; my work, my studies, my friends, my creative endeavours, through which I found meaning in my life, and many of those have all but disappeared due to my bipolar disorder or subsequent treatment, shrinking my life and limiting the areas in which I might find meaning.

I'm currently only working part-time which leaves me with days when I have vast expanses of unoccupied time to fill. I understand that it's necessary for me to be working part-time at the moment; my stamina is still not what it has been and I tire easily, but some days I face an empty afternoon and genuinely wonder at how on earth I'm going to fill it. There's always TV or fooling around on the internet, but these things don't really add to any grand sense of meaning in my life, they feel like activities to mark time.

I used to occupy more of my time with friends. My illness isolated me and has left me at times feeling friendless. I know this to not be the case but it's difficult to maintain friendships when I'm sick and barely able to leave the house or afterwards, in recovery, when I'm taking such painstaking care of myself and trying not to exhaust myself. People drift away and it can feel like they've turned away instead. At the moment I'm trying to reconnect with some of those drifted friends but where previously I could pack a full day with socialising I now know I need to pace myself and do one activity per day, so it's a slow process of reconnecting with the outside world.

I think one of the greatest losses is in my creative life. I used to write plays. While I was never prodigious or disciplined in writing regularly, it was something I always had a hand in. I'm unsure whether there's a dulling down of my senses from the medication or if it's just that my brain is still too preoccupied with its own illness to contemplate anything else, but I have no inclination to write a play now and feel like I may never again. While there should be no need for a creative outlet when there is no creative outpouring, it was something I used to define my personality. But now, if I'm not creative play-writing Katie, I wonder who am I?

There are of course still areas in which I find meaning. I adore being Auntie Katie to my three wonderful nephews and I find that my role in their lives is a rich one, I hope for them as well as me. I hold a treasured place in my family, something being sick has actually made me more aware of with the care and affection that has been afforded to me in this time.

And there's also this blog. It's a solitary exercise to write this and I often feel like it's purely an exercise in self indulgence but then the feedback I get makes me feel like it is worthwhile.

This week I am beginning a course of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy with a new therapist. I suppose this also has me thinking about the meaning in my life as part of ACT is committing to values in your life, so I'll need to define them. I'm hoping this will be a guided process and in weeks to come I'll be able to tell you more about the values I am realising in my life. In the meantime, thank you for reading and by doing so contributing meaning to my small but hopefully expanding life.

Happy Winter Solstice!

My prayers were answered and it was a remarkably short stay at The Melbourne Clinic, thanks to a medication adjustment.

I was taken off the Abilify and started on 10mg of Saphris and 75mg of Effexor. Within a day I started to feel brighter and as the days went on I noticed I was less tired, my anxiety lessened and within the week I could honestly say that I no longer felt depressed, hence my discharge. It's remarkable as well what a difference the absence of side effects makes. They were only ever slight with the low dose of Abilify but there was a constant underlying sense of restlessness I experienced. So far, side effect free on the new meds, apart from the mild drowsiness after the evening dose of Saphris.

Taking the Effexor is a bit controversial for somebody such as myself with a bipolar diagnosis. Antidepressants, particularly those of the SNRI branch, which Effexor is, can cause mania and that was the real worry with putting me on it. I was concerned too that my sudden mood shift was one that was going to head into the stratosphere, but so far my mood seems stable at a positive place.

The other thing that was a huge help from my hospital stay came from a group session run on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. The session was specifically on thoughts so I was interested in attending due to the hostile nature of the thoughts that had recently been clogging my head. In Acceptance and Commitment Therapy we are taught that we are always going to experience negative or painful emotions, thoughts and physical sensations and rather than trying to avoid or fight these we can learn to accept them and cope with them and commit to living by a set of values.

In the session I attended we were informed that around 80% of our thoughts are involuntary and they tend to predominantly be negative. Avoiding or fighting these thoughts exerts a great deal of energy and is mostly ineffective. Instead we must accept that we are having negative thoughts. The thing to understand though is that our thoughts are not necessarily important. They are not commands we must obey or the truth or threats. If we can recognise that our thoughts are not necessarily important then we can examine them to find out instead if they are useful or helpful. Then, if the thought is not useful but still present there are a number of ways to accept the thought while minimising the impact of it.

I'll give you an example, say you have a recurring thought like 'people hate me', you think this over and over and immediately your amygdala lights up and sends cortisol into your body and your heart starts beating faster and you begin to feel really bad. Rather than continuing thinking 'people hate me' (which is an unhelpful thought) or trying to avoid thinking it, which tends to make the thought come back stronger, you can try thinking 'I'm noticing that I'm thinking people hate me'. The thought is being accepted, but diffused by the language surrounding it and the impact of it is lessened.

This all might sound like psychology mumbo-jumbo but as somebody who has the thought 'people hate me' about ten times a day, I've actually found it really effective. And it doesn't just work for that thought, oh no, it works for 'I've failed at life' and 'my life is a mess' and all other manner of thoughts. Try it some time! You might like it!

Well, anyway, the conclusion is, I'm feeling pretty darn good right now. I'm inside and warm on this cold day, the shortest one we'll have this year. Even though this means we're at midwinter, I like to think positively that the days are only going to get longer from now on. And may they mostly be happy ones!