Dear Insomnia

Once again I can’t sleep.  I usually go to bed with a movie or something on for the background noise but I felt like this was just going to keep me awake so I shut it off.  Once I shut it off my brain turned on.  Some things are trivial, some things are negative anticipation, some things are stress over the wedding and the rest was flashbacks of Kyle.

I’m getting anxiety over having to switch psychiatrists because I sadly cannot afford the $60 a month co-pay, attempting to get stronger pain meds (as the ones I am on are mostly Tylenol) from my family doctor at least for the winter, I have to make an appointment with the neurologist as my migraines are getting worse and spreading down the side and back of my head, I have to make an appointment with the orthopedist for my knee….blah blah blah….

I still haven’t told my real dad that Jake and I are engaged and, as much as I want to, I’m afraid that when I tell him and my grandmother, my grandmother is going to initially be happy but then go for the “fat bride” and just start going in on me about losing weight and what not.  I intend to lose weight as I want to be a fit bride and just fit period, but this is a topic my grandmother focuses on constantly.  Whenever I call or come over it’s the second thing she brings up in conversation right after “how have you been”.  I even imagined her saying something and me going on a rant towards her about her issues with things as she is a judgmental southern woman and then running to the garage to ball my eyes out.  Yeah….that’s how I envision telling my real dad and grandmother my great news.

I don’t know how to ask my parents to help out with the wedding.  Traditionally, the bride’s parents are supposed to help pay for at least half of the wedding but I am BEYOND afraid to ask them and I have no idea when I should do such a thing.

I want money for the wedding gifts rather than getting registered but really we do need to register for some things and I am just stuck….I’d rather be able to pay for the wedding vs. having people pay for certain things we want/need for the house.

And unfortunate of all things that keep running through my head, I’m having flashbacks.  Not just of Kyle, but of days when I was an alcoholic and previous relationships where I had seriously made an embarrassment of myself.  I have no idea why *Kevin keeps showing up, but when he does I feel the same way I did as if I was in that moment all over again…..and these moments that flashback are not good moments at all – this man nearly killed me twice and habitually beat me….I was convinced that I was going to die by his hands before the relationship ended.  Flashbacks of him I need not.

Sedatives aren’t helping me sleep.  For two weeks I’ve been up for two days and then down for 12 hours.  I tried just being in the moment, breathing deep, and mentally repeating “everything is okay right now, right now everything is okay”.  It worked for a bit and I started to see strange nonsensical images like I do when I am about to fall asleep and then promptly snapped out of it.

The scene I played out in my head with my grandmother and the fat thing was when I decided to sit up and list out loud the things that were bothering me in that moment, the things that built a racetrack in my head at the time.  I knew I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep as I had already been laying there for two hours so I gave up on sleep and here I am writing this.  I wish there was a reset button on my brain sometimes. 

Somebody Else

I keep sleeping.  I can’t get anything done when I sleep my life away.  I woke up at 11pm after sleeping for 16 hours.  Now all I can do is sit here and cry.  Not like before where it was just a little bit and then I felt better.  This is the kind of cry that doesn't stop.  For every hypomanic episode I must expect a depressive episode yet I never do.

This feels more intense than it has before.  Normally I just cry for a day and then I feel better towards the end of the day.  This time I want the world to disappear.  This time I feel like I want to die.  What’s the point of being alive when I have to live with this disorder?  What’s the point of being alive when my mind tortures me constantly?  What’s the point of being alive when I’m slowly going insane and will probably off myself by the time I’m 60?

I know I won’t feel like this tomorrow but I’ll feel like this again and again and again through the rest of my life.  Another day will come where I feel like I’d rather float out to sea than be bothered by everything and everyone around me.  Another day will come where I feel as if I have fallen into a hole and I’m watching everyone around me wishing I could be anyone else. 

I’d love to be somebody who’s at least slightly sane.  Somebody who isn't a step away from being a hermit because their mind has kidnapped them.  Somebody whose life is actually eventful rather than the highlight of the week being that I went to the fucking Wal-Mart and didn't have a panic attack.  Somebody who isn't afraid of most things around them.  Somebody who isn't afraid of themselves.  Somebody who isn't ashamed of themselves and their own feelings.  Somebody who doesn't have to hide what they feel from everybody and then be embarrassed when they slip up and cry in front of somebody because they learned not to show emotions and weakness.  Somebody else.

 I guess days like these will always come back, I just hope I learn how to deal with it better.

I Crashed and Saw Jesus

After a hypomanic episode I usually crash hard...and I did.  I have been taking my meds properly but every couple of months I will have a hypomanic episode and then crash like a speeding car.  I slept for three days straight.  I had gotten up early Friday morning because I was supposed to volunteer to box and wrap toys for people in town who couldn’t afford to buy toys for their kids and then I had a doctor’s appointment at 11:30, or so I thought.  I was so tired that no amount of coffee and caffeine pills could help me stay awake, so I decided not to go help the toy people (yeah I’m an asshole who’s selfish) and I rescheduled my appointment only to find out I actually didn’t have one that day so I went to take a nap.  My nap turned into an all-day sleep.  I woke up at 12:30 at night/morning and when I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw, instead of the ceiling fan, was a gigantic crucifix with Jesus on it like the kind in a church.  It wasn’t a split second vision it was there for a few minutes and then it finally faded away and there was our ceiling fan.

Now I have to explain that I always have really messed up dreams.  I’ve had them since I was little and they used to freak me out but over the years I have gotten used to them.  They are technically night terrors.  Sometimes I remember them, but it’s usually when they are particularly fucked up that it resonates with me and makes me feel weird all day.  I don’t remember what I was dreaming about the night that I woke up and saw Jesus, but I saw as hell wish I did.  I went back to sleep around 5am thinking I would just get up with Jake when the alarm went off for him to get up with Leo…..I didn’t.  I slept until 4pm.

When I woke up I started crying and I had no idea why.  I got up and went to the bathroom and when I came out Jake was standing in the kitchen and Leo was on the stairs (he was waiting for me to comment on his new haircut he got that day).  Jake asked me if I needed anything and I said I was thirsty and he offered to go get me a soda and I started to cry and said he didn’t have to.  He grabbed me and held me and I kept crying and said I didn’t know what was wrong with me.  I know now that it was from my giant crash but at the time I couldn’t stop myself and I didn’t understand.  I went back to the bedroom because I didn’t want Leo to see me crying because he wouldn’t understand.  When Jake came back I told him about the Jesus thing and he said that was strange and suggested that maybe he was trying to tell me something.  So what could Jesus possibly be trying to tell me?

Eventually I came out of my funk and was fine…except for Jesus.  I can’t stop thinking about that.

A New One I Wrote this Morning About What's Going On With Me Over the Past Few Days....Strange Things

SOMEBODY HAND ME A MIXER

I’m confused.  I have hypomanic episodes that last about four days and I have depressive episodes that last about the same amount of time.  Thankfully they are never back to back but I do crash after a hypomanic episode.  By crash I mean that I’ll sleep for 12 or more hours straight and I have zero energy the next few days.  What’s going on right now is that I’m exhibiting hypomanic symptoms but also the crash at the same time.  I’ll have hypomanic energy and I’ll get tons of things done but it only lasts for a little over 24 hours and then I crash and sleep for 12 hours.  One day I slept for 14 hours, was up for2 hours, and then promptly fell asleep again.  I slept until noon the next day.  That day though, obviously I wasn’t able to go to sleep later and went right back into the hypomanic stage….until 36 hours later when I yet again crashed.  This is what is happening right now.  I slept until 2:40pm and had tons of energy and have been getting loads of things done….things that I have wanted to get done for weeks but didn’t have the motivation or energy to do so.  I’ll crash later tonight and then it will start all over tomorrow.  What is going on?  I’ve never experienced this.  Has anybody had this issue?  What did you do about it?  I personally don’t mind having the 4 day hypomanic episodes but this mixed state is just plain annoying.

Bipolar Diaries pt. 16 - Return to Tinley Park Mental Hospital Part 2 - UNEDITED VERSION (pre-novel editing so you get the raw deal) - Originally written in November 2010

Immediately the doctors at Tinley park decided that I should not be on Klonopin AT ALL so they cut me off of it.  Anybody who takes this knows you are supposed to gradually wean off the med as it can kill you if you just plain stop taking it.  They significantly reduced my Paxil and my Lithium.  This change messed with me so much that after about 6 days I started yelling at the staff and the other patients when they pissed me off.

I had been here before so I already knew how things were going to go and how everything worked.  I also remembered how horrid it was last time because the nurses are bitches (and that’s putting it nicely) and at one point I ended up having to take care of one of the patients because they ignored her.  She didn’t belong there anyway, she needed to be in a nursing home.  I expected it to be just as bad this time, but for the most part it wasn’t.  The nurses were the same but the people were different.  Things did get a little ugly towards the end though.  I'll get to that in another post......

Before I go any further, it must be noted that this place is a state run facility.  It was a wonderful crap hole.  Like I said there were rubber beds and rubber pillows.  The food was horrid and on top of it I’m a vegetarian but the last time I asked for vegetarian meals what I got was rice with salsa on top.  So I just ate what was given to me and I ate everything on my plate so I wouldn’t be so damn hungry all day, plus they watch to see how much you eat.  Ro Ro made a comment that “this is just like Girl Interrupted.  It’s life imitating art imitating life”.  It was very true that we were almost living out the movie.  That place even reminded me of the bit in The Changeling when Angelina Jolie’s character goes to a mental hospital.  It’s a bit creepy really.

Before my groups were set up I waited anxiously for meals as we were always starving.  I was more anxious about my visitors.  Even though they came daily they always seemed to be late and I always cried when they left even though I knew they would be back the next day.  At one point they were running so late I thought they weren’t coming and started to have a panic attack.  When I asked for something to calm me down they refused.   Thankfully Mum brought me clothes and  I asked my fiancée to bring me a shirt that smelled like him and some pics of him too.  Last time I was there I was in the same outfit for days and stinking like hell because even though the facility has clothes for people who don’t have anything to change into, I couldn’t get anybody to help me get anything until 4 days before I left.

I went to all the groups just to make the time pass and in between I spent time with K, J, Ro Ro, and the Serbian stripper.  They had a library there so we got to pick out movies to watch on the weekends.  I had books and word finds that Mum had brought me too.  J and I would sit in our room talking and marking our word finds.  My last weekend there we played Jenga in the rec. room, but there was so much noise I started to freak out.  The groups were boring but I put my two cents in to participate and make things look good for me.  The only issue was when I confessed that I have a fear of going out in public and the person conducting the group pointed out that it was all in my head…as I know this because our mind is everything we are, fear and do.  Not to mention my disorder is a mental illness - a sickness of the mind.  So I know all too well it’s in my head, I just don’t know how to stop it and I really did not appreciate the insinuation that I was being ridiculous.  Ro Ro understood what I was trying to say and was defending me, but the group leader persisted so at that point I yelled out “I’m done talking just move on!”

The Serbian stripper was quite an interesting, and beautiful, creature.  I was quite enamored with her, even from the start when she came into the place like a bat out of hell.  I don’t remember what she was yelling about but she was yelling at the only male technician there.  He had surly demeanor at times and always seemed to be annoyed with the patients and he couldn’t be bothered with us.  So we all watched in awe as she went ballistic on him but we also felt slight gratitude towards her.

© Nina Allen

Bipolar Diaries pt. 15 - Bad Days Are All In Your Head (a bipolar rant) - UNEDITED VERSION (pre-novel editing so you get the raw deal) - Originally written in November 2010

When you start the day out wrong, everything else goes wrong.  At least it seems like everything else goes wrong because you’re already in a stressful mindset. 

I’ve been stressed out all week anyway because my step-son’s mother is playing a game with my fiancée and Mum and using my step-son as a pawn.  To put it short, my step-son’s mother hates me and wants for him to have nothing to do with me.  She picks small things to get mad at him for and then blames them on me.  She even claimed that I threatened her and said she was a bad mother when I wrote her to say that if she had a problem with me to come here and we could sort it out.  I may have only known my step-son for 8 months but I have grown very attached to him and he told me that he considers me to be a mother to him.  So I am stressed and saddened over this whole ordeal and things seemed to be very bad Tuesday evening.  He called to tell Mum everything that has been going on and that he wants to come see us because he misses us.  He told me that she said she wants him not to have anything to do with me period.  You see I had posted pictures of an outing of him, my fiancée and I to Facebook and some of the pictures had him in it.  One of the pictures was us together.  I tagged the ones with my fiancée in them but did not tag the ones with my step-son in them because she made him remove me from his friends list and I am sure that she wasn’t happy that his profile listed me as his mother.  My fiancée tagged the photos of him that are on my page.  I said “you watch she’s going to think I tagged those photos and freak out” and she did.  My step-son is 16 and can choose to live with us if he wants.  Not to mention there is no custody agreement and his mother refusing to let him come over here is illegal.  So there is all that.

Yesterday…. Yesterday was bad.  For a bit now I have been having cervical issues but do not have the insurance to get it checked to make sure it is not cervical cancer which I am at a high risk for.  I started my period two and a half weeks early yesterday.  There’s problem one.  I have homework that I need to get done for my psychology class at Ashford and the computer kept running uber slow, freezing and crashing, making it so that I barely got any work done and further irritated me.  There’s problem two.  I had to ship some things from eBay to my buyers and seemed to have gotten charged the same price for everything I shipped despite the fact that all boxes were different sizes and weights.  I was charged $46 for 4 boxes.  Sadly I did not think to look at the receipt until five minutes later when I was like “hey that’s not right” in the library parking lot and the post office was closed by then (I took a long time in there).  That leaves me with only $30 profit from what I sold.  I feel there was a mess up and started to worry about money.  I plan to call the post office and speak to the post master this morning.  That was problem number three.

Now we come to the fourth and final problem of the day.  Before Mum and I left the house we told her husband that there are problems with the computer, told him exactly what was going on that we needed him to look at it.  The thing is, I know enough about computers to know to maintain them but he made it so that he has a separate profile on the computer I am using right now that is password protected.  So I can’t go in and update the things that need to be updated, or cleaned, or de-fragmented because our profile does not have administrator privileges.  That in itself is frustrating but he seems to think he is way smarter than everybody else.  Mum and I were gone for a few hours and when we got home he hadn’t even touched the computer.  Everybody was irritated about that.  So he finally comes upstairs and just like I knew he would he’s asking me what things are and I have no idea because he is the one that put them on there.  I went downstairs to avoid the frustration and a little while later he came down asking about a game on here and I told him I downloaded it from a site that I buy games from all the time.  He said “well that’s causing the problem” which is impossible because I just downloaded it Tuesday and the computer had been acting up for weeks now, which I mentioned that to him two weeks ago and he didn’t do anything about it then either.  I’d never had problems with the site I bought games from and Mum knew this so we were both defending me saying that it wasn’t possible because the game in question is new.  Then he said to be wary of Facebook, so I turned to my fiancée and said “Okay no more Facebook.”.  That’s when Mum’s husband started yelling, and I do mean yelling, at me saying “Fucking listen and quit playing little fucking games!!”  Mum instantly came to my defense and told him to quit yelling and that we weren’t going to listen if he was going to yell, so he stomped off in a huff muttering under his breath.  So it’s fixed now right???  WRONG.  My fiancée turns the computer on and now the internet doesn’t work on it.  It’s not the internet itself since it works on the computers downstairs.  He came upstairs again to fix it and I started noting all this stuff coming up on the computer that shouldn’t have been because the “computer wizard” screwed things up.  After a few more hours of trying to get the internet to work I was convinced that the computer was just plain dead now.  I went downstairs again just to avoid this whole thing and told mum what was going on.  She, my fiancée and I agreed that I’m getting a laptop with the money that I was saving for Christmas presents and then her husband can’t touch it and screw it up.

Mum’s husband is constantly trying to tell me what to do no matter what the situation is.  In a lot of ways he reminds me of my mother, especially when he started screaming at me last night and the words he chose to use.  This is not the first time we have had confrontation either.  Once I snapped at him for talking to me like I was an imbecile and brow beating me.  I must admit though, last night after the screaming I felt overwhelmed by the whole day and shame.  I started to cry a little, hiding it as much as I could, and all I could think about was that my mother was right, I am a bad person and a burden.  I do know that Mum’s husband thinks I am a nuisance and a burden so I try to avoid him as much as I can just like I did with my mother.

Yesterday helped me realize that it’s the mindset that makes it seem like the whole day is going wrong, one thing after another.  If I can remember that and once one unfortunate thing happens remind myself that it’s just one instance and there’s a lot of time ahead of me, I might fair better and have less episodes.  The other thing that I learned is that my mother still has power over me even though we no longer speak and she has done more damage than I know of at this point.  The more I examine my actions the more evident the damage becomes.  I think the Mother Chronicles needs another installation.

© Nina Allen

Bipolar Diaries pt. 14 - Return to Tinley Park Mental Hospital pt. 1 - UNEDITED VERSION (pre-novel editing so you get the raw deal) - Originally written in November 2010

(SIDE NOTE: Tinley Park Mental Health Center has since been shut down by the state but it is well worth googling because that place was pure hell for many of us and we were rather mistreated)

I started writing this entry in the middle of October...shortly two weeks after I got out of Tinley Park Mental Health Facility which was on September 28th.  I was in there for nearly two weeks.  It took me until four days ago to finish the first part of this.

I started writing this a month ago.  I should have written sooner when it when it was still out-of-the-package fresh.  I think I was afraid to write it and kept putting it off.  Not for fear that my family will read it because they already know.  Perhaps because I didn’t want to re-live it.  THE RETURN TO TINLEY PARK MENTAL HEALTH CENTER.  Or as I so affectionately call it, Hotel California…thank you Don Henley.

I had gone another night without sleeping…PERIOD.  Then I got into another argument with my fiancée as I caught him “e-cheating” again.  As I sat and bawled on the couch he reassured me it was nothing but I knew he was full of it.  He and his mother left for his appointment and for the first time I was alone in the house.  They figured I was going to be fine alone but being a recovering cutter, I knew I wasn’t going to be.  In fact I had planned to eat all of the Vicodin I had left and then slit my wrists.

Then I decided I just wanted to talk to a psychiatrist as I was having an anxiety attack as well.  Considering the last time I called 911 and went to the hospital for it and didn’t get committed, I thought this was a good idea.  I was wrong.  First of all I told the 911 operator the truth AND while I was on the phone with her I was slashing my arms open with scissors.   This landed me in the worst hospital in my area where I was put into the suicide room.  Except for the first 30 min that I was in there, nobody paid attention to me.  Later a social worker from the hospital came to talk to me….I didn’t tell her the whole truth for obvious reasons.  Soon after that a rep from Will County Mental Health Department was there to do my paperwork….to send me to Tinley.  He was an asshole in attitude only.  He treated me like dirt.  One: I cannot stand men treating me in an unfair manner in any way shape or form thanks to my ex.  Two:  I cannot stand authority figures treating me as if I am a nuisance to their day and I am just a dog in the dirt.  SO I was a bitch right back.  There was nothing I could do to get out of going to Tinley at that time so screw it.

I had called my fiancée’s mother and she was going to come see what was going on but she got an even more frantic call when I found out I was going to Tinley.  I had a panic attack after the call and the nurse came into my room, looked at me square and said “you’re just doing this to yourself”.  My fiancée’s mother fought tooth and nail so that I would go someplace other than Tinley, although I later learned that once you have been in Tinley you will go right back there.  So another ambulance came and carted me off to Tinley Park.

There I was again in this smelly room with rubber couches waiting to be admitted.  At least this time I had clothes…last time I went there all I had was a hospital gown on.  For the 50th time I was asked what was going on.  Then I saw an admitting psychiatrist who asked about my meds and then proceeded to tell me that because I take 2mg of Klonopin and Vicodin for migraines I’m a drug addict.  This is very untrue.  I do not take Vicodin everyday, I don’t do street drugs, hell I don’t even drink anymore and I used to be an alcoholic.

Blah!  It was time for them to send me off to my bed now.  It was 5am when I was able to get a bed so I slept all day and all night, waking up to blood tests and what they call breakfast.  I don’t remember much of my first day there, but I do remember meeting K.  I knew she was gay from the second I saw her.  We started talking about that and we soon discovered that my roommate, J, and the girl admitted at the same time I was were also lesbians.  So we’ve got a handful of lesbians and almost all of the girls in the unit had Bipolar Disorder as well….that’s what helped to get them there.  K was a self check in…crazy loon.

I spent 12 days there and they all seem to blur together.  It’s the incidents and the people I remember most.  The place is cold and dirty with rubber beds and rubber pillows.  Even though my fiancée and his mother came to visit me everyday, I was still going crazy in there.  Most especially with boredom, yet the people there did provide some entertainment and a temporary distraction from a place that was making me even more depressed.

As I frantically write this I promise I will return with interesting stories about the people and my own explosions....and how Tinley managed to badly screw up my medication and treatment.
© Nina Allen