Where Do We Go From Here

I am f***ing up, I am not okay, and I am completely out of control inside my head. My thoughts and emotions are on 1000mph and I always feel like I am a ticking time bomb.

The past two weeks has been emotional for me. I just feel like I barely get my head above water before I start drowning again. The rollercoaster has gotten a little less intense, but when I get stuck, I am stuck and there is no moving from that feeling. Sadly, it is always the down I get stuck on not the high.

Taking medication was hard for me to be okay with, but for the sake of possibly feeling better I grasped it. Now that it is like hanging from a bridge waiting to see if the line breaks, I am no longer confident that I made the right decision. We are weaning off of depression medication number two, only to try again. The side effects of both medications have been different but excruciatingly hard to deal with. There was no adjustment period, just extreme side effects.

When you go into your psychiatry office and just feel like another face to push another pill to it gets really discouraging. I am not a believer that our medical system treats mental health the way it should be treated. We are in this crisis in our society, but we throw a pill at someone and put a band aid over it only to let it fester. Telling your patients the side effects or possible things that the medication can cause is no longer relevant when you just want to push something else into their mouth to “help their symptoms go away”. I don’t want my symptoms to go away, I want to know how to live with the diseases I will have forever and to be able to manage them more effectively. If you want to help me tell me the non-medicine related things I can do to help learn to embrace my diagnosis and live my best life with a disease that still may kill me.

When you go into your psychiatry office and just feel like another face to push another pill to it gets really discouraging. I am not a believer that our medical system treats mental health the way it should be treated. We are in this crisis in our society, but we throw a pill at someone and put a bandaid over it only to let it fester. Telling your patients the side effects or possible things that the medication can cause is no longer relevant when you just want to push something else into their mouth to “help their symptoms go away”. I don’t want my symptoms to go away, I want to know how to live with the diseases I will have forever and to be able to manage them more effectively. If you want to help me tell me the non-medicine related things I can do to help learn to embrace my diagnosis and live my best life with a disease that still may kill me.

I read an article today that put some things into perspective for me, gave me some peace, but also at the same time validated some things I had always thought may be true. For some and most people, depression is a phase. It is a low point in their life caused by some outside factor that has led to a unipolar-depressive cycle. Most people that have this form of depression come out of it and make a full recovery to never have to deal with depression again, but for some people that is not the case. For some people, depression messes with our brain chemistry and no matter what we try we aren’t able to control what our minds are doing or saying. “It seemed his horrible disease was cured — until it wasn’t. He wasn’t cured; as with some cancers, his disease was simply in remission.” Jill Halper states this in her article “When Depression is Like a Cancer” and explains how for some depression is a disease, not a phase. It is a disease that has life or death consequences.

Sometimes I think of depression like an auto-immune disorder or disease. Your body is fighting itself but its not the cells attacking healthy cells, its the brain attacking the body, soul, and spirit. I feel like my brain is evil. My Brain Demon is incapable of having remorse for the havoc it is wreaking. The consequences for what it is doing to me are quite steep and my life has been going down hill since he arrived.

I’ve always had spells of feeling really low, being really sleepy, or emotional. I remember them as long ago as 11 or 12. Then, they were blamed on being a teenager and being a moody adolescent girl. Even when we had to have cardiac tests due to all the chest pain, tightness, shortness of breath, and orthostatic hypotension, we found out it was just panic attacks. I’ve had first hand experience with what mental health issues look like in an ER. Physical and mental pain beyond belief, but hours of waiting and guessing until you are taken back to find out “nothing is wrong”. The Brain Demon started fighting me quite a long time ago, but I wasn’t aware until he made his grand appearance about 3-4 years ago.

Over the years I have just slowly backslid. Every year became harder, then every month, to everyday, and now every minute of the day is a struggle most days. The Brain Demon became more and more of an issue, but manic bipolar was never really on the radar as also affecting all that was going on. When I was a teen my mom would always joke and tell me I was bipolar because of my “teenage mood swings” but was it really just being a moody teen? Was my disease trying to rear its head even then? Some days I wonder how long I have really ignored the signs of my disease.

Today, I find it hard to write. I find every day a challenge to get out of bed. I find that exercise that once was my obsession to run away, is so hard to perform it is like a chore. I do drag myself out 5-7 days a week to make myself exercise, but not out of complete elation like it use to be. Now it is because my disease needs me to exercise to become more bearable. I feel like my disease is taking over all the things that I love and making them its own. I have lost A LOT of things I love in a short 2 years span, which I am sure has not helped my disease in it’s progression, probably just added fuel to the fire.

To put a positive spin on this though, my disease has also brought a lot of amazing things and people into my life. The past two years have brought great, almost unbearable heartbreak, but it has also given me the best people you could ever imagine.

My disease has solidified what I want to do with my future, how and what I need to create my own non-profit for, and how to actually love every single person for everything they are and nothing less. There is nothing like being embarrassed of showing people the darkest side of you. I am learning to embrace my disease. I am learning how to bring out the positives instead of the negatives. The Brain Demon loves the negatives, he has no interest in you seeing that there is more to life than this.

Depression is real. Bipolar is real. These are not just disorders, these can be lifelong diseases with steep consequences.

Cherish each day <3

Our Story ;sn't Over

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