"I'm bored." I lie on my back on our bed with Hunter beside me playing with his stupid Iphone. I kick the foot of our mattress as hard as I can with my heel. I pause and wait for his reply, nothing. I pick up my stupid Iphone and try to play a game of candy crush.
"I hate this game!" I throw the phone down. "I should walk the dogs. You know, I haven't written all weekend. Hunter! I'm starving! I should clean the house! What do I do right now?!" I sit up and stare at him, "I don't know what to do!" I glance at my journal on my bedside table. "I haven't journaled today!"
"Then you should journal." Hunter replies.
I groan. "I can't."
"Why not?" He asks, still playing with his stupid Iphone.
"Because, it's overwhelming." I turn to him. "We should go for a hike! Never mind, I'm tired." I get bored of sitting and lay back down.
He says he's sorry, that his stomach hurts, he asks why I can't just sit and be with him, not do anything for a little bit. I jump off the bed, stretch my psoas muscle, then am overcome with exhaustion and lay back down again. There is a familiar battle intensifying, magnifying in depth and consequence, within me. There is the one side, mind racing with a thousand ideas, energy so high it appears the world around me is in slow motion, slowly approaching the other side, checked out, liquidated, almost lifeless with fatigue. "Let me sleep!" "No! You shall start a business, go hiking, finish your book and eat dinner... all RIGHT now!!!"
This is a battle I've been trying to escape being in the middle of since grade school. Strangely, I haven't experienced it since I went on Lithium 14 years ago. Now here I am, slowly weaning off of my medication, and if feels as if war has been waged once again. I used to punch my locker until my knuckles bled just to relieve the dueling, disorienting energy inside of me. Now I lay here on our bed and kick my heels together, then my toes, then clap the bottoms of my feet. Then move them to one side, then the other, until I smack Hunter in the shoulder. He barely looks up from his stupid Iphone.
"You alright over there squirmy?" He asks. This behavior doesn't seem to phase him at all, which is funny, because it's shocking the hell out of me.
I moan in response and kick my heels back onto the bed then pick up my stupid Iphone again. I attempt to play words with friends and begin scratching and digging my nails in to any part of my skin that is openly accessible, my stomach, my neck, my arms.
The opposing sides grow nearer within me and I feel like I'm going to explode. I jump up, stretch my legs, lay back down again. Hunter chuckles and shakes his head. I turn on one side and moan, then the other before I return to my back and start pedaling my legs around as if I were on a bicycle. I moan louder as I dig my nails into the side of my neck then pull the hair at the top of my head.
This is what's it's like for me. This is what it's always been like. Lithium eased the battles within, mollified the energy inside of me so that it made just a little more sense. But then my doctor told me I couldn't be on it anymore on the account that it was damaging my kidneys. I then started on a 4 month science experiment with mood stabilizers and antipsychotics. I was either blowing up like a balloon and taking a nap every hour or I couldn't sit still and wound up hallucinating due to a lack of sleep. So I'm taking the tools I've learned with Dialectic Behavioral Therapy and combining it with herbs and acupuncture. This is something I've never tried before.
I take a deep breath and consider this fact for a minute as I stare up at the ugly light fixture of our apartment bedroom, realizing that what's happening to me at this very moment has happened before and like all feelings, it is temporary. I look at the indentations my nails have left in the skin of my forearm and then look at Hunter. I access the non-crazy part of me, the one that has somehow not gotten involved with the two opposing entities that are engaging in a sparring match inside my chest, and understand a few things; one, I cannot make myself bleed, I've come too far to enlist in self-destructive behaviors, and two, I need to eat, it's time. So I stand up and ignore what's going on inside my head and my body and take the first step; I change out of my waitressing clothes and into my favorite jeans and a sweater. I take a deep breath and say the words I need to say. "I know you're stomach is upset but I need to get out of here and get some food."
Hunter and I wound up going to my work for dinner and I enjoyed a patty melt and a glass of wine with him. This journey is frightening, I'm experiencing feelings I haven't in over a decade. Sometimes I can't stop talking and other times tears well up in my eyes for no reason. I could wind up returning to the hospital and going back on a bunch of shitty medications or I could do just fine. Maybe I'll find a way to accept that I'm awkward and weird and that depression and mania is not something I need to necessarily be so afraid of, or maybe that's not something I'll be able to do quite yet, or ever. I have no idea. But with the help of my therapist, I've developed a plan, a list of tools that ground me, that make me feel like me, as well as an action plan when the thoughts get to be too much. This is where I'm at right now and I don't know what the next hour has in store, but I'm writing about it and sharing these intimate parts of myself with you, because that is one of the things that make me feel like me.
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