I've been stable\normal for days now! The exact same mood for three days! THREE DAYS!
Dear god I forgot what that felt like. Can't remember if I posted this last time, but I've been taking Celexa & OHMYGOD it is 1000x better than crappy old Cymbalta.

Oh & sorry about this, but I have to post this picure here to the link to its IRL in order to get it the right size for a forum avatar.



I love that digital short. XD

<3

Today is Thursday. Tuesday last week I was suicidal & anhedonic. Elated & blowing on flower pedals on Thursday. I crashed back down on Sunday, I wanted someone to kill me. Finally this Thursday I told my shrink about It All. Oh & that I had let my Cymbalta run out a week ago. Didn't help the rollercoaster, made it a little worse but I would have been all over the place anyway as I have been for a long while.
It is no excuse, but I could not wait until the fucking 23rd for any hope of new relief, maybe going off the Cymbalta would help, I didn't care that it could be bumpy. I wanted it gone.
My doctor refused to give me a PRN unless he saw me first, fine I'll just take care of it all myself.
I'm still on 150 of Lamictal, I need to be on a higher dose but I should just "be patient."
BE PATIENT!?

So anyway my therapist told my parents, so it's all out there.
I'm taking Celexa now, oh god the difference. So much better than the other crap.
T least for now I am stable, been in the exact same mood all day today, THAT is unbelievable. I had forgotton what a stable\normal mood was.

I am very interested with the Enneagram personality system (I am a Four with a Five wing), so awhile back I subscribed via email an "EnneaThought of the day" email which I don't think I had ever opened & franky the emails were getting on my nerves. But I thought I'd read one today, you know what it was?

Growth does not come from escaping into an imaginary Fantasy Self. Growth comes from allowing your ego's story to drop away.

Son of a bitch.
Of all the ones for me to open......
My higher power always sending me messages & signals & stuff.

BTW that unsettles empty feeling seems to have left the building for the time being.

In the confines of my room & my mind I wished that someone would kill me, take all of this overwhelming pain away. I could see no way for me ever to ever get past this stage of my life, seventeen is the furthest progression that I will ever reach. My life could be free of anorexia, bulimia, self-injury & maybe I could have some social contacts but past that I can't see much. To do that I'd have to come out of the closet, I could lose my World, I have no identity without it. I just refuse, I can only see doing the bare minimum to at least get out on my own. Writers often stay behind the scenes, only being heard & represented through what they write. That's my idea of a perfect career. Don't worry, I'm not about to hurt myself, the thoughts were fleeting. Am I quite sure I am bipolar as well so that kind of thing comes & goes along with myself. Emotional pain can trigger a neurological episode & vice-versa, it sure did last year. <3


I'm pretty satisfied with my current World happenings, I have two going.
The current one (happening in real time) is where my main person (Laynie)
is in being treated for bipolar in a state hospital\psychiatric unit outpatient program
except she is going to stay over a few nights.
Kinda cool that I can pretend I'm being treated for my craziness & telling my doctors everything
instead of being too shy like I am now.
The second one is happening in the future (like August, September this year) that I'm not quite sure I'm going to do in real time when late Summer\Early Fall begins (but it's fun to play with) is where this same main person is living in New York (she's in LA right now I've decided she hates it, people there made of ticky-tacky) working as a writer for Saturday Night Live. Wouldn't that be fun?
Funny, one of my first really big Worlds I was a castmember on SNL (in 2004 when I was 11 I was doing that one).
You don't want to know what I\she did with three of the castmates. <:0

Hey wow I'm laughing about this! Good or bad?

I remember this first happening when I was ten, the obsession of my fantasy was so all-consuming that I felt like screaming, my head throbbed & I wondered if I'd go mad. When no matter how much I thought about & played it out, it fell short. What that satisfaction I am looking for I don't know, it's something & I'm not getting it. This feeling always passes & I am able to feel normal again. My obsession is with certain people, certain people usually that are on a show on TV, but my obsession is not with them in the real world it is with my creation of them in mine.

It gets so tiring thinking about them & my character, I want the real thing so bad & can imagine as hard as I can & I still feel empty. I'm bored. I want the thrill, the excitement, the emotional rush, the feeling. But I'm bored. It's not clicking, it all is so fake! I try to "think about something else, maybe it'd be exciting if I thought about that person in the real world, like everyone else instead of make-believe version of them. I can't be myself, that is the most boring, unfufilling thing there is. I am just tired, tired & burnt out on every one of my (fantasy) people.
I miss the fun, the new world I was creating when I was nine. The freshness, the happy colors in my head & around myself. It was new, I hadn't a clue in the world what this was although I figured it was probably some mental disorder but I didn't care. I have no life without it, I don't know how much longer I can keep from going insane.

How do you enter a twelve-step program for an eating disorder & begin to recover, move forward in every direction instead of this one? That is what scares me the most, that until this comes out I am trapped in this desolate land, that this secret will keep me from any progress on any plane of my mind. They say you're as sick as your secrets, oh crap.

I read this the other day, it is me so much it hurt to read, it scared me.

THE SELF-DESERTING AVOIDANT
A clear example of the influence of different personality domains is found in this lasts subtype of avoidant patterns. Self-deserting avoidants combine the social (interpersonal) retreating of the avoidant with the ruminative (cognitive) self-devaluation of the depressive personality. These individuals immerse themselves in a surrogate fantasy existence to avoid the discomfort of having to relate to others. They are not, however, unaware of their use of these tactics (unless, for example, they are concurrently experiencing a major depressive episode with psychosis), and this makes them painfully aware of their perceived inadequacies. Fantasy gradually becomes less effective, and their thoughts center more and more on the misery of their lives and the anguish of past experiences.Waking dreams are displaced by painful ruminations. Thus totally interiorized, the feelings that motivated their initial withdrawal reverberate unremittingly. More and more, they cannot tolerate being themselves and seek to completely withdraw from their own conscious awareness, an existential abnegation of selfhood. Some become increasingly neglectful psychologically and physically, even to the point of neglecting basic hygiene. Some plunge into despair and are driven toward suicide, abandoning life as a means of ridding themselves of inner anguish and horror of their own identities. Others regress into a state of emotional numbness in which they are completely disconnected from themselves. In particularly severe cases,the structure of consciousness itself may split or fragment, leaving a regressive disorganization reminiscent of the schizotypal personality. As this process proceeds, self deserting avoidants become outside spectators, observing from without the drama of their frightening transformation.

This may sound bad, but I sometimes wish I were psychotic or schizophrenic because they see their imaginary friends. It is real to them.

I think about telling my therapist, what I'd say, how I'd say it. I've been working on every issue under the sun for over a year now & have made some major progress. But I hold a huge secret about myself, I don't know how I'd be able to make her comprehend it.

So anyway, I had to spill. Everything has been so well lately, but then I'm reminded that I have this. Then here comes that feeling again.

I live about 30-40 miles outside Austin, TX - location of the deliberate plane crash in northwest Austin (I recognise the place, I remember searching for a Party Pig last Halloween drove right by it). I also took a look at Joe Stack's manifesto\suicide "note" that spells out a number of things. This was obviously not impulsive, he had obviously been thinking this if not planning it for a long while. I do however, fail to understand why everyone keeps using the word "shocked" to describe this. Ok yeah I wasn't expecting to wake up this morning & see a plane had flew into an Austin building, but are people really surprised that "one of their own" would do this?
I am not.
Being the utter pacifist that I am, it may seem odd that I can understand, in a way, why he had so much anger. I have rage, not a violent rage, but I am certainly angry. I do not sympathise, but I understand.

I have an insecurity that makes me feel at fault for my life, but when I think about it I mostly blame the outside world. The extroverted, oversexed, undereducated, oversocial, money-hungry, delusional outside world. I often feel that if I had been placed in a better state, better country, better anywhere that I would not have these problems. I came this way, but I feel that my every flaw has been exacerbated by the outside, the real world sucks, so I create a better one, one that is all my own.
Sometimes I think that if I were not poor, if I had not been subjected to this discusting "system" that this state based upon, then I would have had the best everything. The best education (any education I wanted), the best friends, the brightest future, the best psychological treatment (a crappy MHMR with overworked, underpaid pdocs that have grown bitter & tired is not what I need) then I would be much better off. Sometimes I feel a bit of irritation at my parents, but I know they did not cause this, besides it's hard to be mad at something you can't physically see.

Joe Stack's life is the life that I fear I will have, trying & trying to live, over & over again, only to be pushed back down. Your talent & your ideas & your prospects wasted, wasted.
And you know how much I want to do all that? Not very much. I do feel that an introvert, an Enneagram type Four, a me, has a great potential. I have always dreamt of changing the world, but how? How can I when I live somewhere that ensures that you will stay in your place, get knocked up at 15, live off food stamps (if you are "poor enough" for them of course), work several jobs, and be so busy that your kids have no sense of what the world means & grow up ignorant. That is the plan, that is what was planned for me, so that people like me with a fucking IQ number don't change anything.

So kamikaze missions into an IRS building? Not my idea of the right solution, but do I ever know what it's like to have a massive foot pushing your head into the ground.
"I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different", well yes but violence has been repeated over & over again for quite some time now. And things haven't gotten much better.

So where that leaves me, who knows. My Lamictal has been working I think (25mg still, low but no cycling since I began, except for some late last night), I've been much less melencholy & more stable. I have been less tied up in the Schizoid\Avoidant mess, which has been good for my overworked brain.

So to all a good night.

Good news, I was prescribed Lamictal today. It must be introduced veeeerrrrry sloooooowwwwly because of a risk of a potentially dangerous rash (itching in my brain is the most worrysome problem as of now)
I took my first 25mg tab tonight, and I balled my eyes out! Could this really be it?
Please god let it be true, let this be the beginning of the end of this godamned mess.
I feel so hopeful, a real possibility of having a stable life, whatever (else) has been wrong with my mind may be about to really change.

Yes I'd like the magnificent ups again......(hehe, I remember my first big uppity spell a few weeks ago thinking "wow, is this mania? this is fucking GREAT! wow, this is why bipolars don't like to take their meds sometimes) but you know they last a fraction as long as the damn downs do so F it. If I had never had that happen at such a convenient time then I still would be wondering if I were bipolar or not. And maybe not starting on the Lamb (that's what I'm going to call Lamictal). I was ready to retire there for awhile, ready to throw in the towel & revert to living a hermit life & die of anorexia. Hindsight is 20\20 & didn't see it then, but that depression spell was bad. I knew it was bad when I kept thinking of what it would feel like to die & all that, but you can't see the outside of a house while you're in it. And that house was dilapidated & crumbling.

I was in the waiting room for the appointment & thought I'd do a little prayer to my HP, I did. I believe god did a little somethin' somethin' because I ended up having to see a nurse practitioner rather than usual psychiatrist. Oh good lord was she ever better, treated me with respect, I felt validated & didn't feel like a damn hypochondriac who's decided they're bipolar.

Let it be true.

You know it is so funny how I, who have never done any sort of drug (pot once or twice, highly overrated) can identify so profoundly with all sorts of addicts. Tyra Banks did a show on suburban heroin\crack addicts, ah, I know those people! You know that feeling when you feel like you've met someone before, (oh where have I seen them before) those four kids they had on, I just swore I've seen them before. Not a physical recognition, just that I know those people, I get it. I get why she can sit there & know it's bad, know it will kill her & go on & do it afterwards. I can sit here & type about oh how bad my fantasy illness is, doesn't mean I'm not going to go back to my bed & do it.

I definitely got when she said that she would marry her crack pipe. yes! yes!
I've seen my eating disorder as my true love, my fantasies, my love, my everything. Together forever. And you know what, I've had that feeling, that understanding & feeling of almost deja vu with "those people" (any addict, drinker, depressive, bipolar, borderline, obsessive-compulsive....) a long while before I got any insight into myself.
I figured because I have been addicted to my world, all along I've been one of "those people."


Saturday was a good day, stable & just very nice. I felt content, but one thing happened that freaked me to no end. I sat down to read my book & sip some water when all of sudden this image just jumped into my head, of me probably about 15 to 20 pounds thinner, (now I have been having some body-image-bad-fat-oh-god issues, but nothing so severe that I would relapse, just a string of a few bad body days, oh and I had just checked myself out in the mirror)
okay.... not something good to think about.
Then I just space out, stare off into space as this plays in my head, I keep getting thinner, sickly so, and not the idealised perfect thin, I mean bad. Sagging face, hollow cheeks, veins protruding, discolored skin, dry thin hair. The image is so clear, I can see my face, my face on what's left of this sick creature, I am looking at my body, poking, prodding, turning, posing like I always have. This would be the very lowest weight that I could possibly be & not be dead.

I start getting scared, it won't get our of my head, this is scary, just "get out! get out of my head!" I have my head in my hands, I keep trying to concentrate on reading.
It gets worse though, then I start having words pop in my head 'I've finally erased myself' ' 'this can be you.'
This maybe went on for about ten or fifteen minutes, then finally subside.
I can't quite put into words what it was like, but in a way it was beneficial, I can remember it as a warning; the empty shell of the person who once was there, I saw her.

I think they call it intrusive thoughts, it wasn't thinking that I could control, it played like a dream. I have had that happen before, but what was so odd is that I was in a good mood, not a crazy good mood, just calm & content.
I remember having one of those one time several years back when I was wide awake in bed, it was so disturbing I don't want to relive it, but it just came & went. I do think I was depressed then, but what the F was that?

I wish mental illness were a personal failing, an inability to cope, my fault. If it was then I could fix it, I could own up & correct it. But it's something I was born with, a genetically predetermined yet random bran condition. Reaching into my head & corrects the misfired neurons & serotonin & whatever-nephrine is just not as easy as it sounds.

I had a rollercoaster week after my last nutty post, although I have been normal for three days now. Hmmmm, nice but now that I've had such a high up I wish it'd happen again.
Stable is nice, but..... *whispers* I miss the high

:/

Okay so I have been thinking about the whole bipolar thing, yes no maybe, but I don't think I've ever been hypomanic, but then again most people don't take as much notice to their ups as their downs.
But if I have never had an up "episode" before, I did yesterday.
On the way to my meeting, just all of a sudden I was so elated, tranquil though, not really you energetic, just like someone had hit me with a shot of Valium or whatever. Just feeling, so good, warm all over. Then when I got there I got alot more restless, I was tapping my foot like crazy, everyone was so pretty, I never noticed! I guess I was a little more social, not crazy social though because of course it's still me, but you know I read out of the book easily! No blushing!

And then after I talked to my sponsor, I'm not really mad at her anymore (why was I mad? so what she has a good life?) & told her about the bipolar thing & etc. although I didn't mention how high I was feeling. But it was weird because I kept going from quietly euphoric, peaceful to up & trying to repress laughter (yes I remembered Katrina! she was here before & she had electrolyte water & kept beating herself up!) & then I sunk back to a good normal, still thinking fast, maybe not as energetic, then normal (scared that I may be sad again soon), then back to peacefully elated, then hyper happy.

Just wow, I don't know if that had ever happened before, but wouldn't it be weird that as soon as I start keeping a mood chart & wondering about being bipolar I get an "episode?" Gotta be a god thing, yes take some new meds!
I did sleep though, they say you don't need as much sleep. When I got home I was still going through the motions & did feel physically tired, although my head was still restless & I was all fidgety, but hey my body said it was time to sleep & I did. Easily, nice really.

And today I woke up feeling really good, then back to normal now I bit up again.
And you know, this did happen when I was all sad & gloomy, I went from horribly depressed to okay but still down, to a bit hyper & sad.

So I am just enjoying whatever this is, it feels good to feel good. :D

I saw my therapist yesterday (one of the people I actually feel comfortable with) suggested that I may be (!) bipolar. If anyone else other than her had said it, I wouldn't have stopped to think, but come to think of it..... maybe?
But I've never been manic, (happy all of a sudden for no reason? yeah), I think I would know if I were bipolar (not necessarily), my depressions are not certainly as serious as my mom's (true, maybe not yet, but it progresses as you age). She says that since I have given several antidepressants a chance for more than a year now & they have been only marginally effective (best ever was Celexa, best for my insomnia, but eventually wore off a bit), she says we don't know that I'm not bipolar, so that maybe a mood stabiliser would do the trick.

And with bipolar II, the major feature is the depression & not the hypomanias (yes I am well educated on bipolar, of course), I have always had the tendency to be depressed for no reason, ever since I was maybe nine. Just the way it is, I wake up & feel like crap.
And then, there's that 24-hour mood cycle, I become alive at nine to ten at night & want to write, get online, talk to people, joke, watch TV, listen to music & I often pace.
I hate it because it's a cause of my insomnia, every night I always tell myself that tonight will be different, I'll avoid all stimulation (internet, TV, music etc.) & just read.
But I just can't, like my body is telling me (no, you need to be awake). And I always get tired, slow & sad during the afternoons unless I have something to do.

My depression periods usually lasted two to three days for a while, now they're going on for a week or more. And still, no matter what, I get wired at nine at night, to where I am still depressed inside, but alive with thoughts & activity.
I don't know, I...... think I am, I think...... but no, it couldn't be could it?

Ever feel like being "well" is as unnatural & episodic as being sick is for some people?
I feel like I do not know how to be well, like it's just a fluke when I am. I'm just a sick person, I wish I'd just be left alone. I don't want to hear that this is a normal phase that everyone goes through in a 12-step program (and yes I have heard it)..... don't tell me this is a fucking phase!
Hell with it, I'm tired of thinking, no one knows, no one can know how it is like for me because they are not me. And besides they have no idea how ill I am, they have no clue.

"Well, just open up & let someone in, get friends & you'll be happy. Put yourself out there, don't be scared....." Oh for god's sake, leave me alone.

I'm so gloomy right now, sorry.

I began taking Remeron & it sucked, made me feel like a zombie, numb & hungry as hell.
I'm still not any better, not a lick, sucks 'cause I had hoped the Remeron would be be a turn for better, but it was a dud. I did get to go to my meeting yesterday, but oh I don't know.
I just can't go forward, all I see is myself being stripped away, being made into an extroverted, engaging, sweetie-sweet kind of person, someone I'm not. "Oh but that won't happen, you'll still be you...... you'll be super-happy, have love....." bla, bla, bla. It's ever harder when you're in love with your pain, you see it as a tragic beauty of some sort. I think I'm relapsing, restricting again.
I'm so tired of thinking, analyzing every thing about myself, to the point where I can't sleep at night, it's killing me. I don't want to think, I want to just rest.

I feel awful, tired. I was totally hysterical lastnight when I couldn't get to my meeting, terrible.
Absolutley discusting, I didn't even feel bad doing it either.
And all throughout lastnight I was in so much pain.... I don't ever think I've felt anything like it before, like a burning.
I hate being emotional. Anyone ever feel like they just don't want to exist? Not that you want to die, you just don't want anything. Nothing, to be back in the womb.
And you know what? All that crap about showing feelings will desensitise you to them & make them more bearable is a load of crap. I want to disappear more than I ever have before, all this is doing is proving to me that I don't want to do this. I wish I could back two or three years when I had no insight into myself at all & I lived in lala land.

I was trying to remember the last time I felt true happiness. I mean I have good days, where I feel good, but it's a shallow good. And only when I'm in my world.
I remember just after I had the whole spiritual awakening thing I did, happy in the sense that I felt secure & hopeful. That maybe lasted a month & a half? So during October I started to lose the hopefulness. I feel like giving up.

Maybe I should take an anticonvulsant? Who knows.