I’m sad. By that, I mean I’m extremely depressed. It’s a feature, I learned, and not necessarily directed by what goes on around me, though manic episodes do trigger hypomanic episodes…and it’s worse depending on how manic the episode was.
I stopped drinking alcohol for good back in April of this year, almost a year after I started trying to stop. I have over 200 days of continuous sobriety now, and am quite proud of myself. Turns out, one of the features of drinking for me was manic blackouts. I was drinking enough for it to happen with alcohol alone, but a month after I quit, I had two that were a week apart. I didn’t want to say anything because I’m embarrassed about an old diagnosis creeping back up (BD1). I swore up and down that I didn’t want to take any prescription medication for it, because what I was given in the very early 2000s for it was the kind of medication that made my mood fall very flat. Plus, in my head is a stigma about the illness that makes a person automatically bad because they’re volatile. At least, that’s what I was told about myself…and it runs in the family, and I know from personal experience that most episodes are triggered and WE HAVE TO STAY ON TOP OF OURSELVES OR WE RISK TRIGGERING OUR EPISODES NO MATTER HOW WE FEEL. I know a lot of the familial alcoholism is due to this issue. I personally never had axis 1 symptoms until I started drinking in 2010. Once I got my drinking under control, the axis 1 symptoms went away shortly after. Eventually any bipolar symptoms kinda faded out. Which is why getting the diagnosis again kinda jacked with me a little.
I manic to blackout, I can’t stop what I’m doing because it’s literally like an out of body experience. When I finally come out of it, I’m so humiliated and depressed that I want to die. Back in the day were frequent visits to the behavioral health units in which I’d have to stay a week or more. Alcohol made it ten times worse. But without alcohol, I can watch what I’m doing, but everything is coming in so fast that I can’t control the reception. The panic takes me into blackout, where like I said, I’m just watching me follow the rabbit and the shiny things and chase it from one point to the next and I can’t do a damn thing to stop.
I promised my coach that if it happened again, I’d tell her, and we’d talk about medication. I was terrified because I don’t want to be on mood stabilizers. Antipsychotics are too potent for me, but stabs seem to work, except they also make me very flat – zombie-like, even. My coach met me in the middle, and I’m on an old favorite combo of Ativan and Prozac. The Prozac helps me stay above the depression/hypomania line while the Ativan prevents it from sending me into hypermania. The Ativan will help me not get too anxious while the Prozac prevents it from sending me into a deep depressive state.
Honestly, I just want to be happy and in control of myself. The mood swings are exhausting alone. And it’s really embarrassing and humiliating to lose complete control of myself like that just because I’m fearful that I’m overdoing it and I panic. But you know, hey, I have a second chronic illness, now. Go me.
But the weird thing is that I’ve been very very good at keeping an eye on myself. One thing I’m really proud of is my self-awareness. I’m good at hearing my mind’s projected trajectory and taking a sleeping pill (what I call a killswitch pill – Trazodone to be specific) to make sure I hit the sack before losing my marbles. For some reason when I took it this last time, it just made me super lucid, but I couldn’t control anything as I said.
Aside from the meds, I have to start practicing better boundaries. In this case, I need to practice closing gates of toxic or negative input, even if it’s specifically my interpretation and trauma talking. For me, that’s social media, specifically micro blogs. I can get away with Instagram, because I’m using that as a tool, not a social environment. But places like bsky are too fast, too opinionated, and I feel more agitated after scrolling for a bit than comfortable, even when it’s not doomscrolling, so it’s time to close it up. Or at least log off for awhile. And I need to curb live streams, because my anxiety at the moment is too much to handle. So when the anxiety is met with kindness, I get launched into a manic state that becomes really difficult to manage, if I can manage it at all.
So on one level, I’m back at square one. But on another level, I’m in the middle of uncovering and addressing problems that won’t come out on their own. So am I simply leveling up? Is this just another one of those painful collapses that I hear about on the road to healing and recovery? It still sucks though. I’d really rather say that I relapsed instead of the truth. It’s easy to blame it on AUD. But it’s not that. I won’t sweep the truth under the rug because it’s inconvenient. It’s just a sign that I need to keep working and keep moving forward, even when it sucks.
And like I said in the previous edit: some folks really do need to realize they’re not clout. I’m not going to chase. Social media makes me think I have to chase when all it makes me is another number. But the truth of it is that I’ve tried so many times with so many people just to feel relevant in their spaces that I forgot where my relevance was with me. I get angry, I vow to treat them when I’m at my best like they treated me when I’m still trying to heal. But I won’t. I’m too nice. I just want to get better. That’s all I care about. And even if it means ignoring my FOMOs, I’ll do it.
Sorry for rambling.