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As many of you know, I am a devotee of quotations – those bite-sized nuggets of wisdom summarizing great truths of life quickly and with wit.
Some years back, in a cold, dingy room choked to the gills with cigarette smoke, bad coffee, tattoos, and incomprehensible blather uttered badly by battered bikers, businessmen, beauticians and stay at home moms, united in anonymous terror, I first heard this said.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."
Later I found that this pearl of wisdom is credited to everybody’s favorite patent clerk, Albert Einstein. However… The more time I spent on the Internet the more I realized that roughly half of all quotes found there are bogus. Some are real but credited to the wrong author; others are totally made up and attributed to a famous, credible person.
Panic attacks suck the reality out of us!
I talked two people down from panic attacks recently and both of them had been worrying that they had lost touch with reality. They felt totally disconnected to the world around them. In talking to them, they were so convincing. I almost believed that this episode was different. But I let go of my own fear for them. (My worry doesn't help anyone.) I quickly assessed that they were not, in fact, psychotic. They were speaking rationally and eloquently.
And I remember from my panicky days how I felt different and disconnected.
I am crazy. I am a fraud. I wanted to understand dissociative identity disorder (DID) because I wanted to understand myself. I didn't like it, though, all this multiple personalities crap that made me feel out of control. So I changed it. I made DID okay. Hard, but okay.
What do you think of when you hear the word “addict?” Do you visualize someone with a crack pipe, syringe, or bottle of pills? Or what about the perp standing in the courthouse being convicted of felony DWI?
It is a sad reality that life is full of things we don’t want to do and mentally-different or no, this is something with which we have to deal.
And it’s even sadder to know that people with bipolar disorder and other mental illnesses have a much longer list of things they don’t want to do than the average person. And, of course, ironically, the mentally ill are typically the least-equipped to deal with such things.
But beating bipolar disorder, or any mental illness, means doing what you don’t want to do, pretty much all the time.
It’s been a few weeks since the Succeed with ADHD Telesummit and my mind has finally quieted. All those tips and strategies, plus the energy and excitement of the listeners and speakers, had my brain fired up. I wanted to implement everything at once and make changes in my life right away! All those great ideas buzzing in my head, all the ‘I have to do that’, created such noise that I didn’t know where to start.
Often when there is too much, there’s no clear path on what to do and where to go. So I stepped away and focused on other projects. Then last week, I downloaded the recordings and listened to each of the calls again with the goal of choosing one or two strategies that I can do right now (with the plan of listening to the recordings again in a few months for more ideas).
Here are some of the key points and “ahas” I plan to add in my life right now:
What a silly title, right? After we reach adult maturity--hopefully before--we understand that the word 'normal' means very little. It is socially constructed and does not do anyone any good. But that does not mean it is not attached to our psyche, our feelings, in one way or another.
Stigma abounds when society is misinformed. Think back to the initial AIDS epidemic. The tuberculosis pandemic. And even the current societal view of addiction as a personal and moral failure.
Stigma begins with misinformation, and spreads with a complacent disinterest in the truth. Therefore, the more people know about mental illness, in theory, the less stigma there should be.
Some of you are reading this to receive validation that there is no way possible to leave your abusive relationship. If you're looking for someone else to agree and say, "Why by God, you're right! You are stuck!" then you are a victim and you are absolutely correct.
Does that help? Do you feel any better hearing me say that your situation is hopeless? There's no hope - your abuser wins. Go sit over there, sigh, and wait for the next episode of abuse. Feeling better yet?
If there’s one thing to remember about psychiatric (psych) meds it’s that you need to take them and you need to take them on time. This is because medication puts chemicals into your bloodstream and in order to keep a consistent level of these chemicals in your bloodstream, you must take the drug as prescribed. This is particularly critical in bipolar disorder as it’s easy to become unstable with an uneven level of psych med in your blood.
But we’re all human. We all mess up and forget things and we all miss a dose from time to time. So how do you handle missing a dose of a psych med?
Where do we go from here? Most of the family thinks just to let her hit bottom and then if she reaches out to help any we can. Some want to just keep paying her bills and just let her sit in the house with no responsibilities. Never been on medication and impossible to get to her when she refuses to talk to ANYONE.
Help.
On the day we agreed to videochat to make things less awkward IRL she woke up with a migraine so we rescheduled to the day after, I made sure to assure her that it was okay and to take her time. Later that day, in the late evening we had a nice chat but suddenly she stopped replying, even though nothing had happened. The day after I texted her good morning and said I hope she was feeling a little better. she wouldn't open my texts.
A couple days after I sent her a longer text saying that even though I had only known her for a short time I care a lot for her and would like to know how she are doing, telling her I'm there for her, assuring her I'm not going anywhere even though things might not be very easy. She wouldn't open it.
A week later I sent a text saying not to feel bad about not answering and that I will be there when she is able to answer again. It's been two weeks since this and she still hasn't opened my texts. She hasn't been active at all.
I don't know what else I can do. I assumed she might have fallen into a depression. I have tried to just not think about it anymore, and I haven't that much but when I do it sort of kills me inside...