I started showing warning signs
for depression in my early teens. Where once I had been a happy,
creative, engaged and normally well-behaved child, over the course of
a few years I was to become quite the opposite. By the time I got to
high school, I was beginning to feel a strong need to escape from the
pressures of school, my parents and even from my own identity as a
gifted and promising young man. I started ignoring my studies,
skipping classes often, hanging around with questionable characters,
drinking alcohol and experimenting with drugs, doing all kinds of
things I knew I should not be doing. I did know on some level that
the path I was taking was likely to wind up sabotaging my own future,
but at the same time I was becoming more and more skilled at not
caring.
My parents were deeply concerned for me, and they sought help from a
variety of different psychologists and psychiatrists. I, of course,
was convinced it was the world that was messed up, not me, and I did
not take my treatment seriously at all... and all the while my state
of mental health kept getting worse. Although I did manage to
maintain a variety of interests and a passion for creating art up
until my second year out of high school, I also began turning inward
at that time, withdrawing from society in general and even avoiding my
closest friends and family. Then, suddenly and seemingly out of
nowhere, in the summer of 1994 my life on earth ended and my time in
hell began. It was then that I experienced my first manic episode,
which quickly landed me in the hospital and labeled me officially:
"Bipolar type 1". Now, for those of you who do not exhibit bipolar
symptoms, please before you stop reading my story, understand that my
experience since being diagnosed has been primarily one of perpetual
depression, and before I was able to begin "beating the beast", only
on occasion did I even feel "normal", much less lifted into a state of
hypomania or mania, and I will save my personal accounts of these two
afflictions for the Bipolar forum on this web site.
With the onset of severe depression in 1994, I quickly lost interest
in anything I had been "into" previously, and my lifelong passion for
making art and music simply died. I promptly dropped out of college
(okay, so it was just a local community college, but still I had plans
to get an associate's degree in graphic design and transfer to a real
art school in a year or so), and any dreams I had of becoming a
successful artist, or even a success at all, were instantly dashed. I
somehow managed to get a job working at a picture framing shop nearby
my home, and over the next several years I would frequently get fired
from that job or whatever job I happened to land three months prior (I
have been lucky that the owner of that frame shop is very kind and
understanding, always hiring me back several months after firing me
once I promised to get my act together for good).
Although I was at times quite incapable of handling any kind of
responsibility at work, the thing that always got me fired from jobs
was tardiness. This was caused by the fact that I found it
tremendously difficult to pull myself out of bed in the morning (even
if "morning" was at 1:00 PM). I still to this day have trouble with
this, but not quite for the same reasons. Back before I started
getting better, all I wanted to do was lie in bed, and NOTHING could
get me out when I didn't want to be out. I would frequently show up
to work anywhere between 5 minutes and 4 hours late, and a little too
often I would not show up at all. Not showing up was also something I
would do with 9 out of every 10 appointments I had scheduled as well.
Part of the reason for that was due to the fact that my memory for
such things is horrible, and back then I rarely ever tried to
implement any kind of "reminder strategy". In fact my brain
functioning as a whole was quite impaired, though a lot of it was
likely due to my marijuana addiction (yes, I did say "addiction" while
referring to pot, and I do believe it was because I could not bring
myself to stop for even a day despite the fact that it did nothing but
make me paranoid and aggravate my already-aggravated mental state),
some of my mental challenges were a direct result of my depression.
The whole time, pretty much all the time, I hated life and I hated
myself. Certainly most of the time I was preoccupied with thoughts of
how much things sucked, how incapable and inhuman I felt, and how I so
desperately wanted to not be alive. Sometimes those thoughts would
become urgent enough that I would actively pursue suicidal ideas, but
luckily never was the urge strong enough that I ever acted on any of
those ideas. My family never stopped caring for me, and I did have a
small circle of friends that I had known from my school days, but I
always felt like I was "out of the loop" with them, and I often went
through phases where I would distance myself from them completely. In
one particularly long "withdraw phase", I hardly spoke a word to
anyone outside of what I had to say for practical purposes... this
lasted for over a year. From 1994 until just a couple of years ago, I
felt like I was not and could not get close to anyone at all. I was
far too down on myself to even try to find a nice woman with whom I
might be able to form a loving relationship with, and not to suggest
that it is the primary reason for me wanting to do so, but I also had
very little interest in sex anyways. I didn't think anybody could
possibly have any kind of attraction to me because I was so repulsive
and so obviously troubled. That assumption may have actually had some
merit, if only because of the negative way in which I presented myself
to the world. Besides the fact that I acted like a zombie most of the
time, I also didn't take care of myself very well in even the simplest
of ways... rarely eating on a regular basis and consequently being
painfully thin, letting my hair grow into a long tangled mess, wearing
clothes that should've gone in the hamper days ago, shaving only when
the mood struck me, even bathing and brushing my teeth somewhat
infrequently. I was a perfectly non-functioning adult for most of my
20's. Lucky for me I had a caring, nonjudgmental family to depend on
for food and shelter... or perhaps I was not so lucky, for maybe if I
had gotten a good dose of reality early on, it might have helped to
stir my active and capable side out of its slumber before I really
messed my life up.
That awakening was not to start happening until sometime after the
turn of the millennium. Somehow, some way, for reasons I still to
this day cannot quite explain, I began at last to realize that I could
indeed transition out of the darkness and that there were things that
I, myself, could personally do to make it happen. On one random day,
I made the determination to quit smoking pot, and I soon found that it
was one of the easiest things I'd ever tried to do. On another random
day, I decided to get serious about my treatment plan, take my
medications as prescribed and really work with my psychiatrist to find
the right combinations and dosages of pills that work best for me.
Then on another random day, I found that technology can be a wonderful
tool for helping me organize and stay organized, and my experience
with computers and other forms of technology can be a great asset.
Still another random day led me to discover that I had long been
ignoring the good, positive and downright wonderful things about life
(specifically mine) and instead focusing (indeed dwelling) on the bad,
negative and downright horrible... and wouldn't you know it, I found
it is just as easy to ignore the bad things and focus (even dwell) on
the good things once you start practicing.
Once I learned to identify the warning signs in me that can lead to
hypomania and mania, I became able to keep these states of mind in
check, even eliminating the mania altogether for over 4 years now.
Gradually, over a period of about 2 years, my symptoms of depression
began to lessen in severity, and eventually they would disappear
altogether. Today, I am still dealing with some issues that exist
because of the sheer length of time I was ill and out-of-commission,
however I no longer feel depressed like I used to, even for a little
while. There have been times when I have felt sad, tired, confused,
etc, but always all of these symptoms have been caused by specific
situations and events... no longer do I feel bad "just because", and I
can always pull myself out of a bad feeling just by focusing my mind
on something else, like a task or even just a pleasant thought. I
still take an antidepressant to make sure the serotonin keeps flowing
like it should, and I take another pill to guard against mania, but
the dosages are low. I have been out of talk therapy for many years
now, but as I said before, there are still some lingering issues that
I am dealing with (and also a few new ones… life goes on) so I have
been visiting the Beating the Beast forums to discuss a few things
with people whom I know understand, and I have been thinking about
starting to see a psychologist again to try and help tackle some
things that I’m still having a hard time with, such as eating healthy
and forming more normal sleeping habits.
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