My shitty week

I'm having kind of a shitty week. Let's see, where to start? How about my shoulder? Yeah, my shoulder is in pain for some unknown reason, possibly the result of too much filing which I've been doing at my job, which is another thing that has been kind of shitty. Usually I like my job a lot but this week has just been a whole load of meh with some blah piled on top. I'm working reduced hours, some days only 3 hours, and when the work itself is shitty then getting the energy up to go in for those 3 hours is pretty challenging.

Since I started with a body part perhaps I'll continue and tell you about my jaw, which is also in pain. I was so proud and boastful running around being like, 'look at me, I'm side effect free' and then I've gone and developed a side effect. It's not specifically just my jaw, but all my muscles are tensing up as a side effect to the Saphris. It's most noticeable in my jaw though because it's currently permanently clenched and so it aches and my teeth ache and chewing my food has become an ordeal. Now if only this would noticeably put me off my food I might lose some weight and start feeling better about my body, which is another thing that has made me feel shitty this week. No big changes here, still just lugging around all the lithium weight and feeling like a blimp.

I wonder if I'd lose the weight if I went off my medication? I've been wondering about being off my medication ever since my psychologist asked me what I thought I'd be like off my medication. I've been having a few issues with this psychologist and I don't think this has been helped by such portent questions as this. I think I'm going to stop seeing this psychologist but then I have to go through the hassle of finding a new one or try going it alone for a while, I don't know, it's all just a weight on my mind right now. What I do know is that I don't need to wonder what I'd be like off medication right now because the agreed upon course of action decided upon by myself in consultation with some very well trained health professionals is that I'm going to take my damned medication.

And that is medication that from tomorrow is going to start costing me a pretty penny more as Centrelink have decided since I'm working all of about 15 hours a week now I no longer qualify for Sickness Allowance and they've cut off my health care card. And what really irks me is that I'm really not earning very much money. Certainly not enough to have saved anywhere near enough money to move out on my own despite leading an austere existence at present. And what I'd really like more than anything right now is to have a place of my own. I miss having that haven and I am losing hope that it will ever be mine once again.

So that's a brief summation of the things going on in my shitty life this shitty week. However, I'm not feeling depressed, despite there being numerous things I could feel depressed about. I'm not suicidal, not even a jot, so even if my life is shitty at present I still fully intend to keep living it. And finally, this week will pass. It may be replaced with one much worse but it may be replaced with one much better. (Please be one much better.)

Strength

There were some mean boys on the bus this afternoon. They stole another boy's laptop and then after he got off the bus they were laughing about another time when they stole one of his shoes. It made me feel glad that I'm no longer in high school but it also made me sad that I didn't feel strong enough to stand up to them and say something.

One of my favourite internet pastimes is a site called Pinterest. Pinterest is great, it's like an electronic pinboard for sharing images and links and right now mine is going berserk with all the American feminist pinners I follow sharing links on what's happening in places like Texas, Ohio and Kansas. It seems like a full-scale assault on women's reproductive rights. Alongside the political pins there are lots of inspirational quotes about standing up and making your voice heard and being strong. These sit uneasily with me because while I know I would like to be strong, I feel at the moment like I'm not and I don't have the power to stand up and make my voice heard. Is there a place in feminism for a weak woman? Is there a place in the world for a weak woman? And if not, how do I go about suddenly becoming strong again?

I feel like I'm trying my best at the moment. I'm medication compliant, attending therapy and support groups, getting enough sleep and looking after myself as best I can. This has taken me to the point where I feel I'm recovering, but still not yet well. I want to be well. I feel it will be my first step towards becoming strong but I can't force this state into being. I wonder if there'll be a day when I realise I've passed from recovering to well or if it's a day that will slip by and only be noticed in hindsight.

Until then I think I'll just be feeling slightly abashed that I don't have more fight in me and I don't know how to be strong right now. I don't mean this to all sound so terribly self-piteous but my honest assessment of myself is that I don't have much strength right now. I think I've used it all up fighting off my demons and now I'm in a slow state of recuperation.

The good news is of course that I'm in recuperation. Little bits of me are flocking back, whether they be social involvements or shards of self-esteem. I'm going to get my haircut on Friday which might not sound like a big deal but for the longest time I couldn't care less about how my hair looked because I couldn't stand the sight of myself and thought vanity was wasted on an empty shell like me.

Perhaps I'll be like some reverse Samson and gather strength from the cutting of my locks, perhaps Friday will be the day I finally realise I'm well. I doubt it, but it's nice to think that that day is coming whether it will be recognised as such or not.

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!

Waiting on a call

Things further unfurled.

My anxiety and restlessness kept me up at night. My concentration deteriorated. While I was away in Sydney this long weekend I started to hear a voice. It gave me compelling reasons to die sooner rather than later. The reasons started making sense. I'm waiting on a call now to say that there's a bed for me at The Melbourne Clinic.

I'm hopeful it's a short stay. I'm hopeful it will just be a simple medication change or even a short round of ECT and I'll bounce right back. I'm hopeful, and that has to count for something, right?

I'm sorry then if it's a while between posts. I'll write when I can.

Ill at ease

I had a few bad days and then things righted themselves and I got back to being me and went off and did fun things like watch new episodes of Arrested Development and book flights to Sydney to see Angels in America. But I was still worried about those bad days I'd had. So in consultation with my psychiatrist I decided to up my dose of Abilify from the piddly 10mg I was on to 15mg.

A few days later and without consultation with my psychiatrist and I have dropped it back down to 10 and if I didn't think it was a completely reckless thing to do I would stop taking it altogether.

For the few days I was on the 15mg I have never felt so ill at ease. I couldn't get comfortable. Even in my favourite track pants. Even in bed. I just felt physically uncomfortable and emotionally unsettled. It doesn't sound like much but after 3 days I was so exhausted I wanted to cry. I was desperate to know if what I was experiencing was common or likely to pass and so I did what any sensible person with the internet does and I googled side effects of Abilify.

Holy fuck! The horror stories out there about Abilify are intense. One of them claims that Abilify actually shrinks your brain! I don't know whether these posts are written by people who have now forgone all medication and swear by goji berries to keep their mental health intact or if they are people like me, desperately trying to find a medication regime that works.

All I know is that Abilify is my only anti-depressant and the plan had been that if I became depressed again we'd up my dosage as the first line of defense. Now that I know I wouldn't be able to tolerate that I'm without a lifeboat. This makes me think that I might need to try switching to a different anti-depressant, one that I'll tolerate better, not just at super low doses.

Knowing this has left me feeling, along with the residual pharmacological effects, ill at ease. I hate trialing new medication as there are never any fun side effects to withstand as you let your body adjust. I don't want to go through that wobbly stage again where nothing feels right and I can't work or see my friends. I just want things to be settled. Of course I could stay on the 10mg of Abilify and hope I'm never graced by bad times again but that just seems irresponsible.

So watch this space for news of new medication. I'm really hoping that on a pharmacy shelf somewhere out there is the right drug for me.