C'est La Vie (This is Life)

To put it honestly my favorite emotion is hypomania. This feeling is my drug of choice similar to feeling spun. During these mini episodes I barely sleep and hyper-focus on writing. It's common in these phases for me to have to be pried away from my desk by my husband after writing for more than 12 hours at a time.

During these times I have to force myself to remember to shower at least every 36 hours, brush my teeth at least every 72 hours, and try to remember to eat. I'll smoke two packs of cigarettes (sometimes more) in a day. These are the only breaks I want to take.

Does writing perpetuate the mania or do I write as a coping skill because of the mania? I don't know, but I do know that it's not a sustainable state of mind. I know if I don't get it under control I'll spiral into a full blown manic psychotic episode and have to be hospitalized. But it's so hard to stop. At times it's impossible to stop the creativity that forces me to ruminate while I should be sleeping.

I know just how quickly I'll switch from sleeping six hours a night to sleeping more than 13 hours at a time. Some people use blanket statements and call these fluctuations in mood and energy “rapid cycling”. General DSM guidelines for rapid cycling bipolar says it's four or more episodes of mania or depression within a year.

Sometimes that's what a typical month looks like for me. How can my mood and energy levels vary so drastically from one day to the next? I'm glad that I don't have stereotypical characteristics of Bipolar type I. For one thing, I don't go on binge drinking episodes (I actually don't ever drink at all). I don't go on shopping sprees or do cash advances against my credit card at the casino.

It's hard for me because my life wasn't always like this. I was on one medication daily for eight years. During that time, from the ages of 18 to 23 I attended college. In that time period I never experienced any episodes of mania, depression, or even hypomania. It was like clock work. I took my meds with dinner, fell asleep by nine pm and was up by six am before my alarm went off every day. I went to the gym every day, came home to shower and do my hair and make-up, then went to class. I was a gymnast with a BMI of 21, in speech and debate and graduated from college magna cum laude.

My doctor was baffled by my success. In the fall of 2012 I was 24. I had been married for over a year and my husband and I wanted to have a child. My doctor told me, "I'm not sure what caused your first episode but I don't think there's actually anything wrong with you. You should go off your medication for the health of the baby. I wish you well and I don't think I'm ever going to need to see you again."

I titrated off my medication as advised. After 4 months I had an episode. The following year in 2014, I stopped responding to that gold standard drug at all. I was in and out of hospitals for three months that summer while doctors tried to find anything that would work. In 2020, I started ECT which has given me the mental clarity and intellectual ability I had in college. (You can ask my mother-in-law - I'm very good at Jeopardy.)

But I'm left to deal with the inconvenience of rapid cycling in mini episodes, which I'm not entirely sure is even recognized as part of my diagnosis. It's not that I'm just being a moody diva with erratic sleep patterns.(You can ask my husband, I'm actually quite pleasant and fun to be around.) It's maddening really. The worst part is when I'm feeling up I don't want to come down because I'll miss the creativity. And when I'm down, I won't get out of bed. It's frustrating but hey, as the French would say, C'est La Vie (This is Life)