Delicate/Demanding

[Anxiety] makes others feel as you might when a drowning man holds on to you. You want to save him, but you know he will strangle you with his panic.

— Anais Nin

I want to go into my bedroom and wake Ryan up, beg him to stay up with me — to stay home with me tomorrow because I can’t imagine how I will get through a whole day by myself.

I could do that. He would do it for me in a single heartbeat; he’s done it before. But interrupting real life is not a healthy way to deal with my anxiety, nor is it a viable long-term option.

Sunday nights are the worst. They bring out the biggest panic attacks as I face down the next five days — sometimes full and sometimes empty — and realize I have to get through a good portion of each one alone. I don’t mind being alone, really, which I know sounds stupid given that I am currently terrified of being alone. No, I am not afraid of being alone — I like my solitude because it allows me to page through books, crank the music and dance in my underwear, plan my plans and list my lists, be alone with my ideas. I am not a stranger to myself and like to keep my own company. What I am really afraid of is that the next time a tidal wave of fear washes over me, I will happen to be alone. Even now, I’m dealing with this panic attack alone, but Ryan is in the next room, asleep, being my safety net.

When he’s at work, I don’t have a safety net. I cannot call him and let him talk me down from the ledge for an hour every other day when he’s already in a time crunch at work as it is. Plus, the phone terrifies me, paralyzes me, when I am like this. And there is no one else. I’ve lived here a year and a half, and I have no friends within a thirty mile radius that I could keep in the back of my mind as a pinch hitter in case things get really rough. I have friends, but none here. I am alone here, a minority in a gray and unforgiving city filled with crumbling buildings. I don’t know a single neighbor’s name. Most of them exchange polite and disinterested small talk on the elevators, but a few are openly hostile and seem to view me as an outsider.

I am all alone in this city, and every Sunday night when I face that reality again, I feel terrified.

November 09, 2009, 1:39am   Comments | 7 notes

I’m so tired lately. No matter how much I sleep, I feel like I could sleep more — except I can’t. I’m exhausted, but I toss and turn restlessly. I feel wrung out. I feel wrung out and cranky and overwhelmed. Little things make cry or make me angry. I’m completely unstable.

Disregarding my feelings entirely, life continues to run its course inside the measure of my breaking arms. There’s bills (and bills and bills) that need to be paid and meals that are supposed to be eaten even though they all taste exactly like nothing. I’m also supposed to be writing something that might turn into a novel.

I’ll pause for your laughter because once it sinks in that I am unable to even focus enough to read a book or do the dishes, the idea of me writing a novel will be completely hilarious. The rumors that being crazy make people wild artistic beasts are untrue; it’s more like being crazy makes me an artistic werewolf and I produce fantastic stuff occasionally when the night sky aligns in my hypomanic favor. Those nights, I see clearly what I want to create and the exact words to cut the path from here to there; what I write needs minimal editing and it’s so sharp it makes my tongue bleed. Much of the rest of the time I lay on the couch and watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer on DVD while occasionally crying about nothing at all and wondering if I can wear this shirt for one more day — at least lately.

Malackey keeps telling me that it will get better, that I will get better. My life isn’t going to be one mood swing after another, and I need to give it time. Patience and all that. Now, if someone could just hurry up and give me some patience.

November 06, 2009, 1:48am   Comments | 9 notes

I intended — and would still like for — Delicate/Demanding to be a place where I talk about mental health issues in general and bipolar disorder in particular. I envisioned more frequent posting, however, and thought that I could clearly delineate between me (shoesonwrong.tumblr.com) and what my mental illness is doing to me (delicatedemanding.tumblr.com). I’m finding it not to be that simple. I can’t always tell where the “real” me trails off and the “bipolar” me picks up. I don’t know that there’s a clear dividing line. As Marya Hornbacher says (in one of my favorite memoirs about being bipolar):

I grew into it. It grew into me. It and I blurred at the edges, became one amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.

I’ve grown into it, and it’s grown into me. I don’t think that’s how it will be forever — and maybe I’m wrong — but that’s how it is right now. When I first learned I was bipolar, I was angry and sad and scared, but mostly I was determined that I was going to get better. I had A Plan. I was going to follow prescribed medicine and exercise and diet regimens, go to therapy, and be just fine. The days of deepest, darkest depressions were gone and I would never have one of those pesky (terrified me straight to my core because I thought I would have to be hospitalized) mixed episodes again.

I am not fine. I take my medications regularly, I exercise as much as I’m supposed to (though if the Good Lord had intended us to use the stair machine he would not have invented the elevator machine, now would he) and don’t drink alcohol. I attend therapy. And I am not just fine.

I’m not trying to say that all these things have been useless. I walk this tightrope of dosages and stair climbing and talk therapy (all the while always, forever, painfully sober), and if I stray from it even a little, I start to fall. The Plan does help; it keeps me always bending, never breaking. The Plan has not made the illness go away, however. And that was what I expected from it — that I could do everything right and everything would turn out right.

I know, I know. If wishes were horses. Something about a beggar riding it to McDonalds in the eighties and making it into a hamburger.

My point is, when I started this thing, I had very different expectations for how things would go. I could blog about Crazy Annie here and Regular Annie here. But they’re mixing, fighting each other, and I cannot objectively tell where one starts and the other one stops — if that’s even possible. More days than not, I suspect that Crazy Annie has won and eaten Regular Annie to gain power from her corpse.

November 03, 2009, 11:25am   Comments | 9 notes