Alive and Level

Well, I'm still here, I keep taking the tablets and all's good. And it's not like I've not had my chemically maintained equilibrium quite comprehensively jostled over the last few months. I had a bout of quite sickeningly horrendous back pain which dragged on for weeks and laughed in the face of analgesia and dragged my average sleep per night down to a few meagre, miserable minutes. In the past that would have been more than enough to precipitate at best a slump into depression, at worst the nightmare oscillations between unfounded, frantic optimism and the bleakest despair imaginable that have blighted my life for the last couple of decades. Then my stepdad died of lung cancer and I came down with Bell's Palsy the same week. So, a tricky time which I don't think I could have navigated without Quetiapine steadying my hand on the rudder. And here I am. Starting to feel creative again, working on some music and writing. Not that many people are wasting their time visiting my humble little blog, but I'm going to try and increase the  frequencies of my jottings here. Oh yeah - over the last month I went to see VNV Nation in Southampton and New Model Army in Bridport and they both fucking ROCKED.

alive and level

still here...still level, which is why I've not felt inclined to write anything AT ALL for months...but I will try...

Out of the fire back into the frying pan

Well, the hour is nearly upon me when I walk back into the office and invite them to reapply all the pressure that contributed to me crashing noisily and destructively off the rails this time around. I've been stable for just over a week and my wife thinks I'm going back to work too soon but what else is there to do, I wonder. I'm okay at the moment - will another week or two or three of equilibrium do anything to make me more resilient? I survived a weekend that was littered with potential triggers, I'm tolerating my meds okay, I'm managing a few basic social interactions now and then...I think it's time to give the whole work thing a shot. I don't want to, though. My job sucks. But then, doesn't everybody's? Oh well...it's been a while since I last posted anything on here, real life and a tangible decrease in creativity the blame for which I lay squarely at the door of my medication have kind of got in the way - and having felt a lot more stable than of late, the motivation to write's been kind of missing. But I'm sure that as from tomorrow my levels of angst and desperation will increase and I'll be back in hypergraphialand again...

Bi Winning

Just over a week ago I was planning the playlist for my own funeral. Now... I feel great. Last Wednesday things reached an ugly, despairing critical mass where I was just sitting downstairs on my own with my face covered in snot, gasping and crying and wishing I was dead, listening to the same two morbid tunes over and over again, reconciled to the fact that my life was over, just twitching and spasming in the last agonal throes of grief for it. Then in the morning I felt okay. I went off to see my psychiatrist who suggested I stay on the Quetiapine and throw some Venlafaxine into the mix as well, which I did. And I've felt fine ever since - not just fine, to be honest, but GOOD. It has to be the Quetiapine, the Venlafaxine hasn't really had time to do anything therapeutic yet. Much as I'd love to rail against the corrupt and evil pharmaceutical industry, I can't really do so with a clear conscience. I know that the medication I'm taking could quite possibly shorten my life, bring on diabetes, tardive dyskinesia and a whole host of other unpleasantnesses but I have to say I find the trade-off acceptable. I've spent a week where I've not been utterly at the mercy of my capricious and wayward moods and it's been fantastic. My family have started to relax - there's even been some laughter in the house over the last few days. Seven straight days of stability has made me realise how UNSTABLE I've been for such a long time. Seven days which are all broadly similar - what a fantastic oddity. I even rang my boss yesterday and told her I'd be back to work on Tuesday. No work tomorrow for most of us anyway, due to the marriage of two parasitic nobodies, no work on Monday due to the May Bank Holiday, just a long weekend with my wife and the kids and the peace and contentment that heavy duty psychotropic medication has brought us...

Today Was A Good Day

Goddamn it all. This was what I wrote yesterday: "Another one of those days, sitting on a cliff, writing not because I've got anything to say but because I've got nothing else to do. Exiled from the family home, where apparently the mere fact of my existence is upsetting everyone, measuring wasted time in cigarettes and scribbled lines. The sun has brought the humans out again. They're everywhere, milling about, “having fun”, futile as fungi, pointless as plankton. I wasn't going to bother doing anymore writing – doing any more anything really – the meaningless nature of all endeavour has kind of broadsided me and left me stranded on a rubbish-strewn reef of ennui. I spent most of yesterday home alone – the family had decided I wasn't allowed to accompany them on a day out – listening to two songs over and over again, one by Warren Zevon, one by Vic Chessnut. I don't have any time any more for anything by anyone still alive. They've got nothing to tell me anymore. Suicide has seemed like a more and more attractive prospect over the last few days. I no longer believe I'm bipolar or that my medication is doing anything other than sedating me and adding to this sensation of detachment – turning me into, to use a brilliant expression I stumbled across on the Icarus Project website, “a muttering turnip.” I don't believe I have anything that can be treated. I'm just scum. I don't FIT IN anywhere, never will. Medication won't change that – jumping off a cliff will.” So, I wrote that then I nodded off in the sunlight with the sea beneath me, woke up, trudged home. I could feel myself closing down. I had no motivation whatsoever, everything did indeed seem just as pointless as plankton (not to denigrate the little chaps and their vital role at the bottom of the food chain – it just seems that they're not the most motivated of God's creatures, don't really exhibit a great deal of ambition, just sort of mill around being eaten). Thoughts of suicide washed over me in cold, heavy waves. Any anger or sense of injustice I may have had earlier in the day had gone – I just felt like unconditional surrender. I'd given up. I was without will or hope - nothing mattered. It was a complete emotional flatline. I sat around til about 10pm, growing ever more despairing. I posted a message on the Rethink forums that said "Just wondering if anyone else has found themselves in a similar situation... started Quetiapine a month ago - was in a VERY mixed state, so much so that it didn't really feel like depression, just felt like I was crazy. Although filled with self-loathing and misery I was very creative, full of energy, not needing to eat or sleep - all the usual. Now, after a month of meds I just feel DEPRESSED. REALLY depressed. Could it be that the Quetiapine has just removed the hypo aspect of a mixed state episode and just left me with pure, unadultered unipolar depression - or could it be that I feel so down as a RESULT of the medication? Am I bipolar with the enjoyable top sliced off or is this some kind of iatrogenic thang? Seeing the shrink tomorrow and she's suggested that if the depression's not lifted then she'll give me some Effexor (which sounds like a whole 'nother load of fun and games)but I don't get it... has the Quetiapine done ANYTHING? Has it just reduced a tolerable if disruptive mixed state to hideous depression or has it actually MADE me more depressed?" An hour later I posted another message saying I was going to stop my meds. Then I sat alone and cried for an hour and went to bed, calm and relieved that I'd made a decision, I would kill myself the next day. And then I woke up in the morning feeling fine. And today was a good day.

I Don't Want to go to Sleep

I'll only have to wake up again...

The Drugs Don't Work

Nothing premeditated, edited or even thought about, really. Reading through some posts on the Icarus Project website last night and someone referred to themselves as "a muttering turnip" whilst on Quetiapine. I've been taking it for a month now and feel more genuinely suicidal than I have in two decades. Spent virtually all day yesterday sat staring at the computer listening to a playlist consisting of only two songs, "Flirted with you all my life" by Vic Chessnut & "Keep me in your heart for a while" by Warren Zevon. I know this is not good. Do I persist with a drug that seems to be making me want to kill myself far more enthusiastically than I did before I started it? Is this some iatrogenic horror or just some existential meltdown with the GOOD stuff you get with bipolar (yes, there is some - energy, creativity, reduced need for sleep) excised by the Quetiapine? Who knows...either way, my nightly dose may well be staying in the box tonight...