March has indeed come in like a lion,
though not in the sense of the weather. It’s actually warming up here in
Leicester and the sun has been shining the past few days. No, the lion I’m very
much afraid, came in the form of some erratic moods.
A week and a half ago, I had a sudden burst
of energy. I had been doing a lot of reading for my PhD and all of a sudden, I
was making connections and I felt this urge to start writing everything down.
My thoughts were flying a mile a minute and I needed to make sense of it all. I
sat down and developed a 2500 word outline in one sitting for my first paper.
The entire time I felt this energy running through my fingertips. It reminded
me of how I felt the first time I drank coffee. It was like I had the power of
the universe running through my veins.
I remembered another time about a year ago
that I had felt this way. I had been put on antidepressants and I had begun to
feel much better. MUCH better. I felt that energy all the time. My thoughts
were racing on a constant basis and I found that I was talking to myself much
more than normal. No, I wasn’t talking to myself; I was having full blown
conversations and even arguments with myself. What’s more is I was arguing with
myself in public…about arguing with myself in public. In retrospect, I find it
a bit funny. I laugh when I think about it because of the absurdity. It all
came to a head one night when I had been pacing around my tiny room, talking to
myself. I had the sudden notion that if I were to run around the giant mound in
the middle of the college, everything would be fine. Perhaps, in a way it was
logical. I had an excess of energy, how do I deal with that? Run it out. The
trouble is, I thought I should do this in my skivvies. Thankfully, I decided
that it would perhaps be better to call my GP the next morning and get an
appointment as soon as possible.
He saw me immediately. I remember bursting
into the room and literally spilling out the past two week’s litany of oddities
at roughly the speed of light. My GP, an unassuming, pleasant and sympathetic
Englishman took it in stride. I’m laughing as I remember his raised eyebrows
and look that if I didn’t know better was the result of his thinking, “Oh shit,
I think she’s nuts.” He took me off of the medication immediately and my mood
stabilised. I began CBT shortly after and I had chalked it all up to a bad
reaction to medication. Until this month.
Once I began to feel that course of energy
again, it was all too familiar. I didn’t feel I could blame stress and the
international move and starting a PhD, at least not anymore. I thankfully never
reached the same height as the episode last year, but it was enough to make me
book an appointment with my new GP. Then I learned a new word: hypomania.
Apparently, this is the “nicer” kind of
mania. It isn’t the kind where you become delusional and begin to think you are
Jesus or that you can control the universe with your thoughts. It’s a milder
form of mania and it described perfectly what I had been feeling. She had me
take a form away to fill out and when I brought it back the next week, I had
checked more than double the “normal” amount of boxes. I hadn’t thought it was
that bad. I really hadn’t.
Then came the next word: Bipolar.
She explained that she didn’t want to
medicate me in case we were missing something else, perhaps a thyroid
condition. I underwent a bloodletting and am awaiting the results at this
moment. She put in for a referral to a psychiatrist but warned it would be a
few months before I heard back. I guess there are still some glitches with the
NHS, though were I still in the US, I’d be waiting forever as I have no health
insurance back home. I couldn’t shake the impact that word had had on me.
Bipolar.
I’ll be honest, I had considered it before.
I had spoken to very close friends about what I was feeling but they always
seemed to assure me that I was just depressed. The effect of this word was
enough to feel like someone had punched me in the solar plexus. I walked home
from that appointment and I barely remember seeing anything. I remember looking
at the memorial arch in Victoria Park and the flowers in the beds along the
walk up to it. Everything else seemed grey.
I began to think about the past month and
how I had been feeling. I had felt everything in HD. Every emotion had been
more vivid, deeper, and realer. I began wondering if that were really a bad
thing. I felt like my protective carapace had been cast off and I had allowed
myself to be truly emotionally vulnerable. I had been more open and I had felt
everything. The amount of empathy I had felt is almost too much to describe,
but at the time I wasn’t overwhelmed by it. It felt really wonderful.
Now, everything was beginning to feel grey.
The power of that word had drained the colour from the world. The past few days
have been challenging. I haven’t been able to pull myself together enough to
work as hard and as much as I want to. I haven’t made it to the box to work out
as much either. I can’t peel myself out of bed in the mornings. I still at
times feel things in HD, but it seems that it’s only the horror, depression,
and hopeless feelings that are vivid. It seems like these elements are standing
out of everything I read and watch and do. I suppose the saving grace is that I
know that this will cycle out. That it isn’t of my own doing. The trouble is
now I feel like I can’t trust the “good” cycle anymore. Is the good too good?
I don’t have a diagnosis yet. There’s still
a chance this is a thyroid issue. In a way, I hope it is. It’s easier to
explain that to someone than to say I’m bipolar. The one elicits sympathy and
understanding. The other, mistrust and fear.
