Life with bipolar disorder: An online diary

7.2.98--page 3

I took myself off of most of the medications and stayed only with lithium. That was 4-5 months ago. GOD I HATE THAT MED! I still had hand tremors, problems with concentration and a metallic taste in my mouth. Last week, I had my very first lithium poisoning. That's when I stopped taking it. I had two different shrinks telling me to get back on it. The thing is, I can't. I just can't make myself take it again. It's not like I don't know what might, or better yet, WILL happen, I do! As far as I can see, I have few choices here. I'll list them from best to worst:

1. taking the medications for the rest of my life, suffering the side-effects and feeling like a weak, fucked up person who can't handle her own life without chemicals, feeling crippled and inadequate
2. die
3. go crazy and die
4. go crazy, become hospitalized and then die
5. go crazy, become hospitalized and stay alive.

See, I do know what's gonna happen. Doesn't sound too good, does it ? And you want to know the sad part - sometimes I feel like there isn't much of a difference between options 1 and 2; and at other times, option 2 seems far better. But here comes option number 6: stopping the meds and hoping everything will be alright, that it will just blow away and if it doesn't, that I could handle things as they come (successfully, of course).

This option has a new element - hope. Let me tell something about hope - you all know the story of how "hope" was the last thing that came out of Pandora's box to help man deal with all the bad stuff that came out first.

I have a different point of view. I think "hope" came out of Pandora's box because it belonged there in the first place. Hope is what "helps" man deal with larger amounts of pain for much longer time than you would think possible. That is, you suffer more and longer, thinking it will get better.

I had a friend who died two years ago. She drowned. She was brain dead for two weeks before it ended, but her family wouldn't take her of life support, expecting some sort of miracle, maybe she'll wake up. They suffered needlessly for two weeks. Some people do it for an even longer time. Some people, like me, do it for the rest of there life - all in the name of hope !

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The one good thing about depression is that hope is one of the things that disappears first (along with your appetite and sleep). It gives you a chance (for better and usually worse) to look at the world without those rose-colored glasses people wear to keep them going. You see things for what they are - not pessimistic - but from a realistic point of view. It changes you forever. And, of course, there are the "ups" - then life is GREAT (during hypomanic phases anyway). The world seems new, different in ways you can't start to imagine - the meds take that away from me :(

I saw and lived in Hell and Heaven - how many people can claim to have done that ?

Sometimes I wish I was really stupid - that I wouldn't be able to think - cause if you really consider it, it isn't our problems that make us miserable, its all the thinking that accompanies them. It's that ongoing search for answers for guidance, for a way out of it all. And you know something, there aren't any answers - only more-and-more questions. But you keep trying to make sense of it, and it burns you from the inside because you know it's all for nothing.

I don't know what to do anymore. I'm out of excuses. But having said that, all of that, I think life is worth living, worth the pain. I can still find some sort of meaning.

Look at Sisyphus and his rock. He represents us all- working every day just to start again tomorrow - the difference is, that like him, I'm aware it's all for nothing - just to see the rock roll down again. There isn't any higher reason - the meaning is the work itself, the struggle. Nothing else counts or matters. It's my rock to carry and I will - that's my meaning !

As for the meds, well I'm still off of them and I don't know what to do next - but who does?

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to
hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time,
and still retain the ability to function.
One should, for example, be able to see that things are
hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

~ F. Scott Fitzgerald ~

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