Handling My Contradictions

 

One of the biggest difficulties I face with my bipolar is feeling like I am constantly contradicting myself. Managing hypomanic decisions when in a depressive episode feels overwhelming and creates a lot of anxiety, especially as I often find myself back-peddling on decisions and letting people down. But the lack of decisions made in a depressive episode then leads me to find myself frustrated, bored, and irritable when my mood is elevated. This means I always feel like I’m fighting a pattern of contradictory behaviour.

I recently had a lower mood episode, finding myself struggling to get out of bed before nine even though I went to sleep at eight-thirty the night before, not wanting to walk the dog very far, struggling with motivation to clean the house. The side effects of my quetiapine do not help in this regard, causing constant fatigue, memory issues and brain fog. In a depressive episode, it genuinely feels like I cannot get my brain to work in a normal way, instead dissociating and lacking energy for anything other than critical thoughts.

This last week, however, having made the decision with my CP to reduce my quetiapine slightly due to feeling like a zombie, I’ve found myself with a much more elevated mood. If you were to use the Bipolar UK mood scale, I thought I’ve been a fairly stable seven, which is the lower end of hypomanic, as I’ve found myself writing almost constantly and walking the dog for miles when she doesn’t really need it.

But the daily contradiction of it all is that when I take my quetiapine come eight-thirty at night, I start to question all the things I’ve been doing and find myself at a three on the scale. I’ve had some thought pieces accepted and due to be published in the coming month, the pieces of work things I’ve been sat on for months questioning whether they’re good enough. It took some elevated mood to actually be proactive and pursue getting them out there, but when the night-time anxieties kick in, I wish there was a way to undo emails and for my work to be retracted.

This is just a small-scale example of constantly having to deal with mood-related contradictions. Don’t get me wrong, everyone is a hypocrite and contradicts themselves, but I find myself mentally and verbally contradicting myself on an almost daily basis, a tiring cycle that just seems to fuel my anxiety.

Last night, Jordan and I were talking about how I can deal with this – how I can learn to deal with the contradictions that come with bipolar. The truth is that, even with the medication I’m on and therapy in the future, bipolar is a disorder that is tumultuous and cyclical. These contradictions are going to continue even if my medication keeps my mood levels a little bit more in check, whether I like it or not. What I can learn to do, is to really think before I say or do things, especially if I’m displaying symptoms of elevated mood.

I’ve started trying to help myself deal with this by having a note on my desk that poses a few questions:

1.     Is this what you actually want, or is it something that you just think you should be doing?

2.     Will you regret making this decision when you’re low?

3.     What about when you’re even lower than you could anticipate?

4.     Can you sustain it?

5.     How many other people could this impact?

I feel that these questions could be a good starting point, prompting me to reconsider and double check before I get excited and commit to or do things that I’m not actually in a position to do. I hate that feeling when I’ve over-committed, spend weeks worrying about it, and then I cancel at the last minute because it’s too overwhelming, letting people down and ruining plans that have sometimes been in the works for months.

But as with everything, this is going to take time, and I have to accept that mistakes will be made and I’ll still have phases where I take on too much or not enough. I suppose it’s all part of learning how to navigate the complexities of mental illness, and I’ve got to start tackling each issue somewhere. So here’s to my next contradiction, most likely straight after I’ve posted this!