Blogging on Bipolar Disorder

I must admit, I don't always hate having bipolar disorder. After all, the first few days of a manic cycle can be wonderful. The pantry gets organized, my room returns to neat normalcy, I write everything I can think of and old stories are revisited with new life.

Then, days like today arrive. I get farther into the mania and suddenly it's not so fun.......I lose the ability to think in complete sentences. My stress and anxiety increase, escalating the occurrences of the symptoms of my long battled Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Suddenly, my brain gets a mind of its own. The thoughts come rapidly and repeatedly. I began having the same thought 5, 6, 7 times or more until the thought is formed properly. I obsess over how the thought it worded -- compelled to think the same sentence repeatedly until it is thought just right. Perfect in a way that may make sense to no one but myself, but makes perfect sense to me.

I get bored easily: it's hard to keep my attention focused on anything, to find anything to occupy my mind with, when I am not able to do anything other than multi-task. Watching DVDs is okay, but I'm really only listening, so it should probably be something I've seen before. After all, I'm going to be messing with my laptop the whole time anyway. Mind you, that's going to suck since I'm going to switch tasks on my laptop every four or five minutes, unable to stay interested in or understand any one thing for long.

The first few days, or sometimes only hours, of mania are exhilarating. If not for those around me, they are at least for me. My mind begins to work in a rapid succession of simultaneous thoughts. I know I'm intelligent, but mania makes me brilliant. My artistic soul becomes that of an intense creator, bursting at the seems with newness and excitement. I talk over myself, tripping over my own words, stuttering and making strange noises. My fingers can't keep up with my brain at any task -- writing, drawing, typing. My eyes can't keep up, words become jumbled as I read, letters transposed as I put words down in solid form. Thoughts burgeon from primal mush in the recesses of my cloudy mind: first they are crawling ooze, then are running, tumbling, jumping jags of light and line.

Then,

it

all

just

clogs up into a jumbleamultivehiclewreckaseachtrai n of thought de____rails. But, I stay manic.

And now, I am confused, frustrated, angry, withdrawn, aggressive towards myself and hating inanimate objects. It mixes, my mania. And I know I should reach for my symptom journal, write about triggers and feelings and events; or, grab my therapy binder and search for just the right worksheet to help me sort my emotions and anxiety out. But I can't do any of that if the thoughts won't stay still long enough to form into sentences. And I can't sleep it off, like depression. The energy is dancing before my eyes when they close. And if pictures form, they aren't the kind you want to see when you sleep.

Yes, I have bipolar and most days,

it's just not so fun being stuck in the middle

of a pendulum of emotions.