So I started this blog many many moons ago with the hope of documenting being on meds for a year. Years have come and gone, meds have come and gone. Cocktails, therapists, doctors and insurances have come and gone.
Now I’m in a new town, starting a new life, and I find myself, once again without insurance. But this time, funny enough, i find myself without a source of income either.
Graduate school, fixed income, total uncertainty. And I will say that this has been stressing me out for the past few weeks since I found out I would not be able to get meds through school. Withdrawing off the lithium, a new place, I’ve had trouble sleeping,which you all know leads to irritability, irrationality, anxiety, and general crankiness.
So I’ve been playing around with different ideas and thoughts, trying to find something that felt like the next step forward. Maybe I rely too heavily on intuition, but nothing was clicking and when things get like that I get frustrated and down.
So what some of you probably know is that I’ve refused a lot of different medication recommended to me over the past few years, because of it’s zombie like effect on the brain. If I can’t create, I won’t be happy, so I refuse to take anything to strong. What this has left me with is dealing with straight lithium so that I still have mild mood swings, but nothing major.
Even on the lithium I am left using coping strategies to handle any intense mood that makes me uncomfortable. Hence the therapy, the knitting, the walking. These are all tools that help me stay stable.
So today I was researching acupuncture for Bipolar-disorder, but it doesn’t look like that will really do much good of anything on the mood swings, though it might help in the future if I find myself depressed for an extended period of time.
But I came across a list of things that should be incorporated into a healthy alternative treatment for bipolar disorder. And oddly enough I’m already doing like 85% of that on a mostly regular basis because I’ve found that it’s all helpful in making me happier.
So here’s the sentence you’ve been waiting for since you started reading this: I’m going off meds again. This time with a better plan. This time with goals and safety nets in place (namely my nightly phone calls with Sara and weekly visits with a therapist).
Here’s some highlights fromt he treatment plan I was looking at:
- Eat more lobster
- learn a foreign language, like klingon
Just kidding, this isn’t scientology. It is much closer to common sense.
Here’s part of the actual list:
An alternative bipolar treatment should include….
- Psychotherapy that teaches a deep understanding of Bipolar Disorder, and teaches skills for preventing, managing and minimizing mood swings.
- Therapy work focused on deep and complete self-acceptance and compassion as well as self-discipline.
- Identification and/or creation of a circle of supportive friends, family, co-workers, and professionals.
*Learning to find balance in work and play, social time, and time alone without guilt.
- Learning to recognize the signs of an impending crisis, and emotional and environmental triggers.
- Cognitive Behavioral interventions (learning to recognize distorted thinking and it’s relationship to emotional states.)
- Meditation
- Emphasis on getting adequate and regular sleep each night.
- Learning to manage stress, and eating healthy and adequate food.
- High quality nutritional supplements — particularly, good sources of Omega-3 fatty acids. (Fish Oil is the most complete – containing both EPA and DHA, essential to optimum health, and brain functioning).
- B-Complex vitamins.
- Work on creative pursuits and expression.
- Regular exercise including aerobic exercise 3x/week.
You get the idea. There are a few other important things, like getting enough sunlight each day, and some wackadoo theories on getting enough darkness at night (which I don’t think I buy into, it’s on the hypothesis that rapid-cyclers don’t have a proper working internal clock).
But overall I think this is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been looking for this year. It’s positive and healthy (with none of the liver and kidney damage that meds cause). There are no side effects to it, and it’s something that I can do myself – which is important in my treatment. It furthers the belief that being bipolar doesn’t mean I’m crazy or incompetent, it just means my brain works differently. And I want to try this. And it’s free.
Now for the caveats:
- If I start hallucinating again I will go directly to a crisis center.
- If Sara tells me that I have started to act irrationally, or that I look dumb in a tin foil hat, I will seek professional treatment.
- If I can’t keep up with this sort of healthy lifestyle, I will reexamine meds, because they are clearly the easier solution.
So welcome back to Surviving Myself, with a new year (well school year I suppose) and a new mission. And hopefully some interesting new blog posts.
Neil Gaiman’s hair has officially becoming a character from The Dreaming. Not a main character, mind you, but somewhere less important that Merv and more so than the young boy Cluracan is caught with.
I’m dead serious right now, I wish I could paint things that break all the laws of gravity and physics to impart upon how righteous that man’s hair is.
So last night gina and I went to Housing Works in SoHo for her birthday and for a charity author/songwriter thing.
The event last night was spectacular. 300 people, plus the incomparable AFP and Neil Gaiman raised $10k last night for housing works. It gives me goosebumps to be involved in that kind of amazing fundraising. And for those who are behind the times int he brilliance of modern charity’s – was done with merely $25 tickets and plenty of booze and merchandise.
Well the auction for the Who Killed Amanda Palmer book helped to when that sold for $1,300.
AFP sang and chatted, Neil read and chatted, they bantered, and then Gina and I outed them as a couple on stage. This is why you shouldn’t allow question jars if you have badly kept secrets.
I almost made a joke to Gina about how all bald guy with thick glasses are secretly Moby, but I didn’t. Then it turned out (when I read the write up in Spin) it was Moby.
Gina and I were interviewed by The New Yorker because we are Gaiman loving, tattoo sporting, ladies. I didn’t mention his magical hair. (Funny aside, his new kids book Crazy Hair debuted at NYT kids #3 spot Tuesday).
I got lots of compliments on my ink.
AFP Loved Gina’s birthday card that one of Gina’s friends made for Gina. You can see a picture of her laughing over it in the SPIN review (link is in a tweet below). They also mention the outing of the couple.
It was good. It was exhausting though. Sometimes when I’m depressed I sink myself farther into the lives of fictional characters, and that not only includes Gaiman’s characters and AFP’s songs, but it includes them too, because they are somewhat fiction for the fact that you feel that you know them, but you really don’t. Also when depressed and I experience any sort of joy, my monster works extra hard to counter balance it. So today I hate to hate myself with extra vigor. Exhausting.
More Blogs soon. Future Topics Include:
- Getting to Know the Fun Side of Depression
- Hormones and Happiness: Separating the Myths with a Scythe
- Why Has Coffee Forsaken Me?
- Inappropriate Capitalizations and the Crack Whores Who Love It
- Map-Reading is a Better Skill than CPR
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Pictures for this blog have been provided by an acquaintance of Warren Ellis (not the Australian musician, the drunk English author).
So the other night I made the greatest salmon that has been. Salmon so great that it applauded me and itself as I ate it. Salmon so great that President Obama called and asked it to be secretary of the fish and game commission. I politely refused the request and finished the salmon.
It was brilliantly simple. I made a marinade with an egg, a ton of dill and fresh squeezed lemon juice. But then, and god knows what possessed me, I dusted it lightly in breadcrumbs. It kept in the flavor and the juices so well that it was far and away one of best spontaneous creations.
So filled with hubris I bought a swordfish steak and attempted to make that for dinner. Never in the history of kitchens or swordfish has a piece of food been so badly abused.
I read up on some recipes and decided that I could wing it. I want to say that this was my first mistake, but I think that clearly, cooking was my first mistake.
I decided on a honey-lime flavor combo, because I did a lot of drugs when I was younger, and this seemed like a great idea at the time. I hear this is the defense that Bush uses when asked why he ran for president.
Then I broiled it. This will hereby be referred to as Epic Mistake #2.
Now I’ve broiled things before. I’ve broiled steak (I think) and aside from that time that the oven caught on fire 1, I think I’m good at broiling things.
The trick to great fish is not to overcook it. But the trick to not getting food poisoning is not to undercook it. So I guess the real trick, one might say, is to know what the fuck you are doing.
I. So. Clearly. Did. Not.
I somehow managed to overcook parts and undercook other parts. It was simultaneously tough, raw, fishy, creepy, and bad at spelling. It was the worst misuse of swordfish that has ever been seen. I’m now on greenpeace’s watch-list for enemy’s of the sea. SVU (swordfish victims unit) has assigned me a case number, and I’m not allowed to leave the area until they’ve finished their investigations. I’m expecting representatives from the swordfish mafia to stop by while I’m sleeping and “have a talk with me”. And don’t think that because they are fish they aren’t badass. They are always fucking armed.
So for the rest of the week it will be sandwiches and vegetables. In fact what I ended up having for dinner was superb – an avocado. Yep. Just an avocado scooped out and mashed with some salt, pepper, garlic, and lime juice. So decadent.
So two latest obsessions. The first is my hair, which is short(ish) and thus I’ve been forced to try to learn how to style it. Which wuold be fine expect I have a very particular idea of what I want in mind, so it’s been very grueling to try and achieve this affect. Right now I’ve curled my hair with an iron and put it in pincurls to sleep in. I have no idea how this will affect it, but the adventure is getting there. And the fact that I sleep in a scarf with booby pins jabbing me in the skull. that’s an adventure too.
The other is obvious if you’ve been following the blog. Amanda Fucking Palmer 2. It was one of those things that happens. You have the CD, it’s fine, but not really doing anything for you. Then you get an urge to hear one song off of it. Next thing you know you’ve played that song at least 100 times in a day. You have held that song down and tortured it for all the information it can give you. Then you listened some more. And before you know it, you are done with that song, and on to the next one of the CD. Playing it 100 times. Asking it where it got the guns, who it was meeting in that coffee shop. You swear you’ll stop hurting it, if it’ll just cooperate and tell you what you need to know.
Or something like that. Right?
(Coffee shop should be one word.)
But I can’t share AFP with most of my friends because she’s more raw than Tori and more oblique than Ani. I think to some extent you need to have mentally arrested at a teenage girl level but still be in your twenties or thirties to appreciate her awesomeness.
NYC tomorrow for purely fun reasons. Matinee of Next To Normal, which I’m told will do well at the Tony’s this year. Then at 8pm I’m going to the see the musical of Coraline. I’m not sure what to expect. It’s a kids book, but it’s a gaiman book, so there is more there. But the 9 year old Coraline is being played by a 50 or a 60 year old broadway veteran. And David Greenspan is playing The Other Mother (which wasn’t a cross dresser or anything in the story so don’t think that makes any more sense). But the rats will have their little rat songs and I think it could be amazing. Or it could be worse that MAry Louise Parker’s falsetto and kung-fu fight scene that we saw last year.
Either way, you’ll find out.
1 Oh yeah, true story. Thought it might have been more my mother with half a bottle of bombay sapphire in her, but my recollection is sketchy due to smoke inhalation.
2 No I swear. She uses Fucking as her middle name. AFP for short.
Just finished first of my final papers. It was for philosophy and the subject was to explore the premise of free will and the premise of an omniscient being. This is not news to anyone who has thought long and hard about it, these two premises are at odds. But aside from the understanding that these two premises are at odds, I had never considered it further.
When I did this morning, I found that through logical thought I was given two options 1, to either throw out free will or throw out the idea of an omniscient being. Since I was already pretty sure I was some form of an atheist I really wasn’t that bothered by that portion of the assignment.
But what I discovered inside myself was amazing. I knew on an intellectual level, if not on an emotional one that I didn’t believe in an omniscient being. But what I discovered was an emotional truth: If there is a god who knows what we are going to do, than we are puppets, and everything is loses its meaning. Maybe it is because I’m a writer that I feel excetpionally attached to free will, because without it, everything I write, I was supposed to write, and everyone I love, I was supposed to love, and everything that touches me was supposed to be there and touch me, and I am merely an actor playing a part of a girl that’s fucked up. There is no honesty in that, there is no beauty in that.
And on the converse, if I have free will, than everything I do is imbued with a beauty in the act of creation itself. And everyone I love is that much more special, because there was no plan, and to find love and friendship in chaos in like finding a lilac on the moon.
And this is all stupidly rudimentary thought. But I sit here now, looking out into my window, and maybe for the first time in my life, realize that everything is more breathtaking than I ever knew before.
And yeah, it is terrifying to not believe in a heaven, but there is freedom in knowing that there is no plan. And the fear of the unknown colors the beauty of the day. And maybe these thoughts will finally keep me from waiting for my life to begin and realizing that it already has.
1 there are more than a few philosophers who did create arguments to allow for both, but it seems to me these arguments are rudimentarily flawed and are what would be described as ad hoc arguments, or arguments that took the answer they wanted and worked backwards to attempt to make it true. Just personal theory, check our Aristotle and Aquinas (along with a few others) to see for yourself.
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