between two poles

Darling, I don’t know why I go to extremes
Too high or too low, there ain’t no in-betweens.
– Billy Joel

I’m in a strange place at the moment. At first glance, my bipolar symptoms seem to be relatively stable. I’m not having depressive spirals, and I haven’t had any hypomanic or manic episodes.

Emotionally however, I’ve been all over the place. It’s too easy for daily events to push me one way or the other, between mildly erratic behavior and sudden sadness. I’ll put myself into a hopeless mood when I listen to a melancholy song or ponder the future of our society. But a small bit of humor or irony at work will raise my mood a little too much.

I’ve been especially vulnerable when I perceive rejection, disappointment, or anger directed towards me. It’s like I stop trusting the people I care about because of a sentence or two of conversation which might be critical. I seem to be looking for reasons to throw relationships away, discarding people and memories like I’ve done multiple times in the past. At my most dramatic, I wish I could run away and disappear from life.

Then again, some days I feel like I’m vibrating with energy. I’ll be overly energetic, working on tasks that aren’t really productive, and putting on the mask to be somewhat social if I feel like it. I’ll be oblivious to this until something triggers the realization that I am being fake-social, and then I’ll immediately withdraw, feeling embarrassed and sometimes angry with myself.

I don’t know if I’m characterizing this correctly, but it seems like I’ve always been able to separate the physical effects of brain chemistry from the lingering emotional damage from childhood abuse. It’s as if I can feel the physical changes coming and prepare for the ocean swell, but my emotional lability sometimes hits me like a sneaker wave crashing on me.

My other issues are still causing some discomfort. I still get episodes of anxiety where I’m terrified of social situations, and I cancel plans or modify my routine to avoid people. My ADHD symptoms seem to be slowly getting worse over time, but I was able to increase the dosage on that pill.

The tardive dyskinesia is also still present; the medication seems to give some relief, but I’m still noticeably shaky and twitchy. I told my psychiatrist more about the mental part of the twitchiness: how I often feel like I need to do these movements, that I get only fleeting satisfaction from doing them, and that when I don’t do it “the right way” I have to do it again. The doctor said he would do some psychological testing next time, so we’ll see where that leads.

Maybe my next post here will be written in crayon from the rubber room.