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The Human Spirit

4:30AM Tuesday night, Wednesday morning.  Something incredibly foul just crept forth from my dog’s ass onto my bedroom carpet.  Note to self:  dogs are not disposals for leftover wet cat food.  I should know better.

It’s not as though her movement was loud but I heard her creeping about due to the fact that I was awake.  This is my second night off of Risperdal.  I have slept for four out of the past 36 hours.  I am tired, but my brain is still doing somersaults.

For years, this had been the way of life.  When battling it, I tried all of the standard cures for insomnia.  Quiet time before bed.  Exercise.  Meditation.  No eating within X hours of bedtime.  Sticking to a schedule.  Useless.  Useless.  Useless.  Over time, Ambien ceased to work.  I could stay up on a pair of 25mg Benedryls and a few stiff drinks.  I fought with it for all but a couple of years during which I accepted the constant fatigue and irritability that comes with constant sleep deprivation and simply slept only when I could no longer stay awake.

A blister pack of small, pink pills changed that.  An antipsychotic (or neuroleptic, if you’re a diplomatic member of the mental health community) called Seroquel brought me down like an elephant gun.  Hell waking up, but sleep was sleep and it was a recuperative coma after a few exceptionally difficult nights in a row.

It wasn’t until a couple of years later that my diagnosis came.  Bipolar disorder and insomnia make excellent bedfellows, it turns out.  My brain does somersaults not because of that slice of Havarti an hour before bed, or because I was chatting on IM until the very last moment before switching off the light — it was flopping about because of some funky business of my neurotransmitters.

During a full-tilt manic episode, I was perscribed Risperdal, another antipsychotic.  The feeling was sudden and intensely calming without sedation.  Twelve trains of thought were reduced to three, restlessness and talkitivity cut to above-average levels from Severely Obnoxious and Disturbing.  As the episode passed, I took less and less of the drug until I was taking a modest dose at bedtime.  And sleeping.  And able to wake the next morning without feeling as though I were coming out of a tranquilizer dose intended for a mastodon.

Now I am attempting to quit Risperdal.  It has an unpleasant side effect of weight gain that I am less than enthusiastic about.  However, I am thinking now that the solution is more exercise and not giving up my sleepytime drug.  Healthier, but irritating.

The idea that there is something incurable, life-threatening, and alienating living in your head is difficult to accept.  Feeling your own mind turn against you, show you things no one else can see, or feeling it will you to do imaginative and bizarre things, or having it turn in dark directions and wells of fear and despair…  It is a discomfort that is challenging on a good day.  It’s not a disease you can excise, cure, or manage with lifestyle changes.  It will be with you until you die and, often, cause the strings tying you to reality wear and warp.  Denial is a huge issue for bipolar patients.  We feel perfectly normal most of the time, and who wants to take medications with obnoxious-to-debilitating side effects if you don’t have to?  But when you go off of those meds, you open yourself to the risk of perilous highs which are chased with dark and lingering lows.  My insomnia reminds me that I am not like the rest of you and I take my Lamictal faithfully.

Worse than accepting a chronic, incurable disease is the notion that my soul is tainted.  I don’t believe in a human essence, but I was conversing with someone tonight who did.  He felt that humans were much like nesting dolls, each smaller shell containing darker and truer secrets until you reach the center, where we keep our “secret self.”  This was discussed in the context of sexual proclivities.  His main point being that you only glimpse the true nature of another in the moment of release, when each wooden doll facade is dropped and a bare person and their bare wants lie exposed under you.

That moment is a dopamine storm.  This happens for drug users and the mentally ill (drugs that block dopamine, like Risperdal, are used to treat such states for schizophrenics and manic patients).  What I call dopamine surge, he called the human spirit.  If the state of orgasm is innately different than that of mania and cannot be reduced to its chemical components, that brings up the question “What is mental illness?”  A disease of the flesh is one thing, but a sickness of soul is another.

My lack of faith brings me great comfort during times like these.  I am simply sick, I am run by a series of chemical reactions, and the smell of dog feces has dissipated enough to no longer keep me away from my bed.

Moving

movingThere’s nothing quite so tiring as moving.  Physically as well as emotionally.  Over the past two days, what was MY space, is returning to a room in a house that is not my home.

All of my linens have been packed up, my dishes, my finer toiletries.  I’m using Chuck’s towels, Chuck’s plates.  I inherited one of his perfumes.  I’m drinking a beer brought over by a friend of Chuck’s.  I’m living out of a large suitcase for the next month.

I’m feeling pretty lost at this point.  Boston has always seemed like a pit stop in relation to my life.  I’ve only been here a year and a half, and I have condensed a failed relationship (turned friendship), two jobs, and one mental breakdown into that short time.

I’ve learned a few indispensable lessons while here:

The lion’s share of dissatisfaction I have felt in my life is due to an illness, not any failing of my own.  Furthermore, cycles of misery have altered my decisions.  Particularly in the realm of relationships.

I’ve been compensating for a lack of personal stability by chasing stable people.  This has always proved fatal for the relationship.  Chuck and I have talked about this at length, and life philosophies come into play.  He and other lovers I have had over the years have a strong need for predictability/safety in their lives.  Over time, I grow bored and frustrated, and leave.  I’ll never do well with these sorts…  The “nice guys.”  I’m much too caustic and mercurial, and the lack of stimulation and friendly antagonism leads me to stagnate.  Good men, just bad for me.

I have felt like a failure for not having finished college yet, or knowing what direction to go in.  I keep changing my mind, thanks to the disease.  Changing how I feel about life, uprooting, flailing, drowning.  I’m reasonably certain of my course now, and am heading in that direction with a plan now.

Every facet of my life is in flux.  My location.  My relationships.  My career.  My mind.

As a manic-depressive with a delta tattooed on her neck, this feels comforting.

moving

we trickle out
she purges us
she bleeds us into the street
and goes pale
and hollow

a space where there was once a print
over what was our stove
an echo where there was a nightstand
in what was our bedroom

she echoes new voices
for whom white means
potential

then, she is nothing but a place
for us
instead of a time

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Take that spending and shove it.

BANGing Balloons

Unsavory things to do to balloons.  Not that I judge.

Saturday Boredom

My downstairs neighbors are having extremely loud sex at this very moment.  She’s doing vocal warm-ups at the same time.  It’s humorous and sexy at the same time.

BFF and platonic lifemate is at her parent’s house all day.  Roommate is giving a talk in North Carolina.  Girl Date is busy all day.  Man Date is most likely sleeping off two weeks of 18-hour days.  I don’t have the option of going to my family’s because I have cat duty this weekend.

There is a large scale pillow fight happening today in Boston.  For the first time in months, all I want is to not be alone; courtesy of drugs, I am well-rested and frisky.  Today is seeming to be a vacuum for social activity.

stables

hank’s face down
on my floor
again

another night without
drinking or
fucking or
wanting for

too proud to be poor
with holes in our shoes
spirit in our glass
and something warm
to grab in the dark

minds
like wild horses
wasted
in stables

Gator Death Roll

There has been a serious uptick in the insomnia in the past week.  Four of the seven past days I’ve had to take Seroquel to sleep at all, and still wake up frequently…  On the nights I don’t take anything, I really don’t sleep.  There’s this thing I call the “gator death roll” where I just roll over and over and over for hours — anyone I’ve slept with can attest that this is just about the most obnoxious habit ever.  So I roll, look at my phone, check my email, roll around some more, look at my phone again.  Completely exhausted, but unable to put out the flames or slow down the burning carousel in my head.  Debating whether or not to just go back to staying awake until I can’t stand up, sleep 3-4 hours, and have done with it.  Frustrating.

Social Duality

Up until this weekend, there was a ceratin duality to my social life.  I had lived in Connecticut until I was 18, then Austin for 7 years or so, then back to New England for the past year and a half.  During these periods, I put friendships in opposite places on pause.  These were people I had grown close to over the years, and felt extraordinarily comfortable with on different levels.  For some, this was the rule that any and all things in my head were open to discussion — for others, it was the rule that the unspoken could be accepted and expressed only in moments of acute emotion.  It’s the art of being known both verbally and instinctually by those closest to you.  The dichotomy of being fiercely private but needing, desperately, to be understood and accepted.  Both beautiful and complex, but confusing to even myself.

This weekend has been particularly surreal in that two of the people I consider to be in the closest friends circle have been introduced.  They’re quite different, and fall into the opposite catergories of friendship.  Awkward, yet satisfying.  Knowing that Best Friend and I will be moving back to Austin this summer is intensely pleasurable, and a moment that I look forward to.  Restarting again…  Maybe for the last time?

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