Day 24: Why me?

Do you even wonder that? Do you ever wonder "why me?". Why am I the one who has to go through this?

Have you ever wondered if there was a rhyme to to the reason, or a method to madness? I've never really felt that way about being bipolar. I've never been angry or bitter towards anyone about being bipolar. I've been angry and felt bitter about having it, but never towards anyone.

Can someone explain where the bitterness and negative feelings come from? Or the pity party when it comes to things like this?

I mean, I did use to live a very negative life and always wonder why I was being punished whenever something bad happened, but I've since come to realize that we humans are on this planet to learn through trials and tribulations, so occasionally (or more often) we are going to suffer.

Have you had an attitude adjustment about something in your life? Do you have something in your life that makes you truly wonder "Why me?'. Do you think it's an accurate question to ask, or that it's a valid concern to have? What is it that you wonder about? How do you counteract these feelings, if you do? Let me know in the comments!

Day 9: Change can suck sometimes.

This writing thing is hard. I don't think I realized how hard it was coming up with something new every day until I started trying it. I'm glad I've got my schemas going on and can discuss those, but it's hard to keep writing when I really don't want to. Just a quick note here, I thought I could write about my 5th schema tonight, but it's just not happening. When I started I was in a great mood, and was motivated, and had energy, and life was amazing. And then I cycled.

I feel like crap, and I just want to curl up into a ball and not deal with anything. I've fallen into this deep pit of despair and see no way out, so I'm just struggling to stay afloat. This is the hell people with bipolar live with. I go to bed and have no clue what emotion I'll be dealing with when I wake up the next morning. I've been crushingly depressed the last 2 days, and for absolutely no good reason. I was happy as a clam for a good few weeks, there was no reason for things to change, but they did. All I can do is wait as patiently as possible for this dark cloud to lift and the sun to come out again. I get so sick of waiting patiently though. I get so sick of the sun going down so often and for no reason. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I don't see me living a long and fruitful life going up and down like this. I can't hack it. The people around me can't hack it. I mean, don't freak out, I'm not suicidal now, but that option sure looks more and more appealing the deeper I fall into this black hole. And its not even because I see no way out. I know this too shall pass, and I'll feel on top of the world again, but I don't know when. And even though I'll cycle back, I know I'll then start playing the waiting game again for the next time I crash. And I don't want to live like that. It's a bullshit way to live your life. It's a horrible life to let others into because it becomes their hell too.

I mean, in fact, life is going rather well. My husband got offered his new job, and he starts in 2 weeks, we bought a new car yesterday that is ten times nicer than any one we've ever owned before. We're paying an arm and a leg for it, but with Josh's new job, we can afford it. I want to refinance ASAP though, just so we're not continuing to pay an arm and a leg. I try to live as non-extravagantly as possible for some reason. We've been through two unemployment eras since this depression hit, and I like to keep our debt to income ratio as low as possible. You know, just in case. I think this preparing for the 'just in cases' in the worlds are wearing me out. It is physically and mentally exhausting trying to worry about every scenario that could go wrong, and yet I keep doing it. Josh is sitting over here happy as a lark about his new job, and our car, and the change that is happening all around us, and I'm lying in bed crying about nothing.

I think what is really eating at me is the change that's happening all around me. Even though it's good change, beepers don't do so well with change. I mean, our insurance is changing at the end of the month and we'll have copays again, and our prescription costs will be higher, and yeah. We met our out of pocket back in March, so we've been enjoying free healthcare since then. Starting in August we'll be paying for services again. I'm trying to think of what all I need to have done in the next 2 weeks before we roll over into a new insurance plan, lol.

And then there's the housing issue. I found a house. A glorious house. A gloriously perfect house. And it made me realize that we're not going to live here forever, and that's another change I'm not prepared to deal with. We didn't get the gloriously perfect house, someone else jumped on that offer before we could, but that's okay. God works on his own time, and when it's time for our gloriously perfect house to appear, it will. But I'm already overwhelmed and depressed about the thought of packing everything up, and going through the work  of moving into a new place, even though it's at least a year away before it happens. I am not being very mindful right now. Right now, mindfulness sucks, and is hard, and I don't even want to deal with trying to do it.

So that's been life the last few days. My mum is super worried about me, and Josh is super worried about me, and I just don't care. Right now I'm teetering on the edge of destruction, so it's a good thing I see my psych doctor tomorrow so I can talk to him and see what he recommends. We'll see if he thinks I'm dangerous enough to be admitted. I mean, idt I am, just because I'm not actively suicidal, but he's a new doctor, so I don't trust him too much just quite yet. And besides, I made a goal of 31 blogs in 31 days, and well, they don't allow electronics on the psych ward, I wouldn't be able to keep up if I missed a week of blogging. I'm giggling at the thought of trying to get my inpatient therapist to approve letting me have an hour a day to blog for 'therapeutic' reasons. I make myself laugh. I love it. Josh thinks it's cute how much I manage to amuse myself. I'm like a puppy chasing it's tail and being perfectly happy.

Speaking of puppies, I have to share with you the cutest story. My son is 3, and one of his favorite things to do when he's not being Batman is to be our puppy. He'll crawl around and bark, and come over and nuzzle our knee to get petted. If only he'd show some interest in potty training, he'd be the perfect pet. Well, our 18 month old has a speech delay due to mild hearing loss, so she doesn't talk or anything yet. She makes a lot of sounds, which is good, it means her hearing is probably either improving, or just staying mildly impaired. So, I guess needless to say, when she does something with sound or anything interacting with us, we get wildly excited. I tell you about my son's game of playing puppy so you'll understand this story with my daughter. She's been walking since the end of March, and doesn't generally crawl anywhere anymore. But for some reason the other day she started crawling around on the floor going 'ruff, ruff, ruff'! Believe me, it doesn't sound like that, but whenever we say it, she gets down and starts making the same sound. It is so freaking adorable. If I had it captured on video, I'd be linking it for your viewing pleasure.

I'm glad I made the decision to write tonight. I'm actually feeling a whole lot better now than I was when I first started. There's still so much more I could write about, like my disgusting house and how depressed I am about it, and how hard I am on myself for not being able to keep it clean, but that's related to my unrelenting standards schema, so I'll save it for when I finally write about that. I keep making the goal to get one room a day clean, and my poor mum, she was worried enough about me today, she came over and helped me achieve my goal of getting the kitchen done. Me, my oldest, and my mum all worked on it, and it's nice and sparkly now. With any luck, I'll have the urge to finish up my living room tomorrow, and then I'll have two nice and sparkly clean rooms. That will thrill me to no end.

What brings you up when you're down? How do you respond to change? I'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments!

It's that day again! Thankful Thursday!

It's one of my favorite days again! Thankful Thursday! I've had a really rough week, and my trials seem particularly numerous at the moment, but today I am grateful for so many things. I am so grateful for a loving Father in Heaven who hears my prayers and answers them, for moments that build my testimony of Him, and for lessons that I've learned through Him.

I'm also incredibly grateful fr my family; my husband who suffers so many things silently so he can provide for us, for my mother who does all she can to stay close to us and still try to look after us, lol. For in-laws that help out whenever needed and adore my children. I'm so grateful for my children who are the tools God uses to teach me lessons more often than not, lol...but especially because they are my most precious jewels that money could never buy.

I'm grateful for you readers who stick with me and muddle through my blog posts with me, and especially for those of you who are kind enough to leave a comment on your thoughts and opinions as well. I love you all, and I'm so blessed to have you here in my life.

Apathy Versus Acceptance

How do you know when the reason you're letting something roll of your back is good or bad? If it's because you've accepted it, or simply because you've become despondent and apathetic over it? This is what my therapist wanted me to think about this week, because I've just been letting life slide past me, not really caring one way or the other what was happening. She asked me pointed questions to see if I was just coming to terms with our situation and ad accepted it, or if I was so overwhelmed by all the events that I've become pathetic. Given the sheer weight of everything on my shoulder's, we determined I was simply shutting down and it was apathy dictating my behavior, not acceptance. I want to be clear here, acceptance is not approval, it simply acknowledging what's going on and doing what you can to improve the situation. Apathy is your brain shutting down to protect itself from more stress...not literally shutting down of course, but hopefully you get what I mean.

I've mentioned our issues with the IRS a few times over the course of this blog, and I'll probably mention them a few more times as this blog goes on. They're complete douche-bags...well, the entity as a whole, I've talked to some really kind and wonderful people over the course of dealing with our tax issues. Now, if you want a sincere douche-bag, that would be the state tax commission. Those bastards REFUSE to work with us, and instead continue to get some sick pleasure out of garnishing our wages...stopping for a few months, and then saying "JUST KIDDING!", we really want another couple thousand. In addition to the $3000 they've already taken. And that has nothing to do with the $50,000 the IRS thinks they're going to get from us. We don't even have $5,000 in assets, paying off an incorrect debt of 50k will never happen.

I've talked about this a lot in therapy because it is a HUGE stressor that literally makes me sick to my stomach thinking about it. I've talked to tax lawyers, and they all want at least 5000 as a retainer before they'll even take the case on. At the advice of my therapist, I contacted a few CPA's, and they want 750 to just get the years not filed done. Once those years are filed then I can take over and hopefully get the OIC that I originally sent in reconsidered. I had no hope at all until I discovered CPA's and that they could help too. It resparked my hope that there might be a light at the end of the tunnel because while $750 is a lot of money, it's much less than $5000.

All this stress with the IRS has led me to be very apathetic in other aspects of my life as well, I've lost interest in my marriage at times, I've felt hopeless about the future, felt like things would never improve, and it's even led me to contemplating suicide at times...what right does the government have to have so much control over my life like that. I think they have more control over my emotions than I do somedays. It's not right. I shouldn't have to feel so despondent over this that I can't function on a day to day basis because I've just given up on life. What right do they have to harass people to death?

Oh the trials we mortals have to suffer through. I'm sure some of you are reading this and thinking "I wish that was all the problems I had', but it's worse than that. When our wages are garnished it pulls us down to the poverty rate of a family of three, and there's 6 of us. We don't live a lavish lifestyle by any stretch of the imagination, and we can't even pay our bills when this happens. We've been together 6 years, and because of this whole thing, we've never been on a family vacation, we don't have our kids enrolled in any extracurricular activities, and even going out to dinner as a family is a luxury we can seldom afford. My husband and I try to go out to the movies at least twice a month, because we value date nights and realize how important they are to a marriage, but that's the extent of our entertainment for the month usually.

Take right now for instance, we have $40 in our bank account, and 4 days until payday, and both our cars are on empty, and there are bills that still need to be paid. Part of this shortage of disposable income is my fault...I have so many medical bills that we're trying to pay off, and it's really eating into our income as well. We'll be paying off medical bills for at least another year, unless by the grace of God we find another job that pays more and we can pay them off sooner. And speaking of jobs, to make matters even wose, my husband was informed last week that his job will be relocating to Oregon as of June of next year, so he is frantically job searching for work here in our area. It's so hard to stay encouraging during this trial because he gets so down over every place that declines to interview him, and it breaks my heart. I don't know how to comfort him and really show him the confidence I have in him.

I hate living like this. I pray that things will improve, and I have hope for the future right now, but it's a long, cold, depressing path I'm on when I get overwhelmed by all this. Sorry for the downer blog, but I had to vent somewhere about what was going round in my head, and since this is my blog, what better place to do it then here?

So, apathy or acceptance? Where do you think I'm at with all the stress going on in my crazy life? And what's going on in your life? Cheer me up with the good news in your life right now.

I'm going to be a real published blogger!

Guess what everyone? I signed up for a guest blogger website, and got a request from a website to write an article about bipolar disorder, which, (while not being a medical expert, feel I have some expertise in), I did!

I totally expected them to send me back an e-mail saying thanks for the effort, but this isn't what we're looking for, but they didn't!

Instead I got e-mail saying they really enjoyed the article and it will be published June 17th!

I can't believe it!

That's all the news I have for the moment, but I'm sure I'll have something new to talk about soonly!

We're only as sick as our secrets

I heard this a lot when I was in the hospital. The therapists there taught us that sharing the things we had hidden in the deepest recesses of our hearts could help us heal. I was super skeptical at first, but as I opened up and talked about the things in my past that had been buried away, I actually started to feel...different. I felt emotions again. Well...*one* emotion. And it sucked. I hated how sad I felt, and it was a crushing sadness. I had no idea how long it would last, but if that was what happened when you opened up to try and let the inner hurt out, well...I figured I could live without it, especially if it was going to leave me a crying mess all the time. And we were pushed to our limits to feel and acknowledge our emotions, and to open up, and to discuss things. I was no small source of frustration to one of the therapists because I simply couldn't open up and talk about things. She would push and push and try to make me feel, but I couldn't do it. Not in front of a group of people. If I was going to lose control, I'd do it in private, thank you very much.

As much as it sucked, it was incredibly therapeutic and I discovered that I had to be pushed into emotional turmoil if I were ever going to make any progress on 'fixing' me. And once I told the therapists, they did all they could to help keep me working hard on issues that were incredibly difficult to work through...because I was in a safe place, and if it triggered too much, I would be okay. I begged my outpatient therapist to push me just as hard, but she won't for liability reasons. She said she is willing to push me, but not like they did because she has to make sure I'm safe when I leave her office, whereas I wasn't going anywhere in the hospital and I could be pushed harder.

But here I am, nearly a month later, and the intensity of the sadness faded, and other emotions have been felt as well. I've felt excitement at going out with girlfriends for lunch, I've felt happiness at being with my husband, joy at watching my youngest learn to walk...there are still times when I feel sad, but it's not that deep dark sadness that I felt at first.

Letting out your secrets is a hard and painful thing to do. My therapist has me doing a lot of writing for her, and she also has me working out of a DBT workbook for bipolar patients. The last writing assignment she gave me was harder than I'd expected it to be. She wanted me to write a letter to my schemas, (for those of you who don't know, a schema is basically  belief that you have about the world that is severely skewed in a negative light, which affects your thoughts and actions; it's also called a life-trap) and explain how they made me felt. I know my top 6, and I wrote to all of them. It was a painful process.

My main schemas include mistrust/abuse, social isolation, defectiveness/shame, self-sacrifice, unrelenting standards, and insufficient self control. I won't go into what those all mean here, because I don't see any point to it. I don't like that I have these life traps which affect my thought processes and perceptions about the world. I'm especially frustrated that I don't know how to fix them myself and that I have to rely on my therapist to help me work through them.

I want to be able to do it on my own because that's just who I am. I help other people with their problems, and I handle my own stuff myself. If I can't fix myself, then that must mean it was meant to stay broken. This is the attitude I had for the longest time, but it's recently began to change to where I can accept that if I've tried and tried to fix it, then maybe it's okay after all to ask for help. I just hate asking for help when I don't know what help I need.

So are we really only as sick as our secrets? I was a disbeliever at first, but now that I've started sharing my some of my 'secrets' with people I trust...(like my husband, my therapist, my church leader), I've noticed a difference. Some have been eye-opening in your face changes in me, and others have been more subtle. I think I can agree that we're only as sick as what we're hiding on the inside, and getting it out into the open...to be laid bare for all to see, can be one of the best healing steps of all.

Stomping Out Stigma!

Stomping out stigma!

May is Mental Health Month, and I'm trying to do my part in helping stomp out stigma!

#stompingoutstigma

 

The beginning of my story...

Hi, I'm Tricia, and well, I blog about living with bipolar disorder. I'm a full time mom and a full time blogger. I have 4 adorable kiddos, and one amazing husband!

 

This is the beginning of my story, which starts here...

 

I say the beginning because my story is still unfolding. When I originally wrote this I was on my meds, doing wonderfully until a mini-disaster struck...I stopped my medications, which is something I've always had a problem with. So there is more to this story, but that's for a different blog, at a different time.

 

So my story....it’s about a bipolar woman who struggled to find herself, and still struggles to find herself occasionally...which is just one of the joys of being bipolar.

 

The story of a girl who's struggled with being misdiagnosed since she was 14, and has only recently found the right diagnosis, which means she could finally start finding the right meds. The story of a girl who struggled with being a cutter and dealt with anorexia as a teen. A story where staying stable enough to not rotate in and out of the psych ward was a battle that took years to settle between her illness, the 'real' her, and the mental health courts.

 

The story of an unstable girl who had no one to speak for her rights, let alone the ability to speak up for herself, who over time became the woman who no one walks all over and is able to speak up for her needs and desires. This is the story of a woman who cares about those walking this dark, almost unendurable path of hopelessness and despair because she's walked it too.

 

This is the story of a girl who once lost everything of value, all within the blink of an eye; her family gave up on her, her child was taken by the courts, she was evicted from her house, she had her car impounded, she lost her job, she lost her clean criminal record, and she lost even the desire to live. Everything of value to her was ripped away.

 

Over the course of a year, I’d completely hit rock bottom. I had absolutely no where to go but up. I crashed and burned and spent 6 weeks in a psychiatric unit, being watched to make sure I stayed alive. Ultimately, a decision from me had to be made. I had to start trying to live again. Because for the majority of those 6 horrid weeks, I just existed, willing myself to die.

 

So I did it. It was a small miracle, but I was released from the hospital close to Christmas time. My parents begrudgingly took me in off the streets and allowed me a place to stay. For that, I’m grateful. It was a small, but huge thing that managed to push me back into life. On New Year’s Eve, I reflected on my year, and all that had transpired, and realized that I had just survived what could only be described as sheer hell. It was absolutely the worst year of my life. Knowing that it was going to be all over in only a few short hours had a powerful effect on me. I woke up on New Years Day a new woman. I owned myself again. There were still setbacks, sometimes daily, but I eventually felt better and better more and more frequently.

 

Clawing my way up; tripping over pebble sized family issues, stumbling over seemingly insurmountable legal troubles, working through horrid rough patches that would set me back so far that giving up would feel like the only feasible option, I survived these trials.

 

There was the eventual turning point, the huge moment where I knew change had happened . Happiness had become a feeling that I recognized again. I was feeling real emotions for the first time in years and I now knew I wanted to somehow become a worthwhile member of society. I had finally overcome the pain of existence in what had seemed to be a hurtful, cold and meaningless world.

 

This is the beginning of the story of triumph over my bipolar disorder.

 

After years of suffering, I finally took ownership of my disorder and completely changed my life around. I went from being homeless on the streets with no rights to her child, no support from her family, and legal problems that would take years to untangle. The story of my life, my new life, was when I began having a life where I  truly lived in the moment. I gained a college degree, married a wonderful man, and started life as a stay at home mom to 4 wonderful children. It was a new life of becoming successful and trusting that success could last. It involved acquiring the courage to take risks while knowing I could fail, but still going for it. This is the story of a girl grateful for the new found confidence in her work, and being truly satisfied in the work she produces. This is the story of a girl finally accepting that she has the ability to succeed at anything, all she has to do is put  her mind to it.

 

This is not only a story of difficulty, hurt, suffering, and pain ,but is predominantly a strong story of hope, as well as a story that encourages advocacy, and a  strong passion for getting rid of the stigma surrounding mental illness. This is a story of caring and compassion, with a focus on the importance of volunteerism and service, and of giving back to those who are going through the darkness of mental illness themselves.

 

Ultimately this is the story of a woman who wants to give back as well, to offer support, to give people hope and to give hope to as large an audience as possible. I wanted to share a story that wasn't just an interesting read, but also a story that is emotionally charged, hopefully moving, and a story that resonates with everyone who reads it. I want you to passionately feel the emotions that bipolar disorder patients suffer with.

 

I want you to not just think, but KNOW changes need to be made, and to know, really know and understand who you're advocating for and why it needs to be done. A story that moves you to contact programs in your community and start doing something NOW. A story that has you contacting your local politician and becoming a voice for the mentally ill in your community.

 

But ultimately I hope you read a story of hope. A story that  you read and after finishing it, feel encouraged that there is hope for the mentally ill, there is treatment that works, and recovery is possible!