Safe Areas, How Moving Impacts Bipolar Life

Moving day is almost upon me, tomorrow I’m out of my co-op, my old home. I’ve already started to look forward to the new place, but moving is rough. It’s rough on a lot of people, but I think that it’s a little rougher on people with bipolar. But it may just be me.

The thing that makes it rough is that I’ve settled in and have my quiet spots. When I’m manic or depressed, I have my own little space that I can retreat to. Now that space is gone. I don’t have it any more. I haven’t had a very good one since I was evicted over discrimination of my diagnosis. But I still had a small enclave in my bedroom that I could safely retreat to. These spots are important psychologically since they provide an area where people cannot intrude and whatever I do, I’m not going to be watched, judged, or interrupted. Moving takes all these spots away from me.

It’s a problem that I’ve faced at other times. When I go home to my parents, there’s no place that I can retreat to when I feel my moods changing. I’m very private about my mood swings. I live with my girlfriend and she’s only seen me rapid cycle a few times. For me, my natural response when I have these swings is to hide, they’re embarrassing since I’m all out of sorts and I feel even more vulnerable during these times regardless of whether I’m swinging up or down.

These areas also entrench me in a geographic area. It’s literally an area where I don’t have any intrusions of any sort. It’s almost a sacred space. I read in them, watch tv, laugh, cry; any emotion where I’m feeling a little out of sorts will cause me to go to these areas. I have only one outside of the house, it’s semi-public, but in the summer it’s nearly always vacated. Still, when I see someone else in there, I start to panic in a mild sense. It’s like someone is intruding into my life when these areas are violated, and I actually mean that it feels like I’m being violated. And the thought of a stranger living where I have these spots is very unnerving. Despite being gone, there’s still someone there who doesn’t have the holy respect for it that I did. And it makes my personal space shrink to just a few feet around me to the point that right now I have mild claustrophobia despite sitting in a relatively large room.

If you live with someone who is bipolar or any other mental illness, and they seem to have certain areas that they like to settle in to at all times. It might be a conscious or unconscious safe area for them. If you see these behaviors, try to respect the areas. Even if they’re not around, just have that area labeled as X’s area and leave it at that. It doesn’t have to be a big area, for me it’s one of my really ugly chairs that I have to take with me. It’s important to have these little safe areas to associate with calmness and have it bring me down from anything that’s bothering me. And I have a sense that this is probably true for other people too.

Going back home after being evicted

So while I’ve been evicted, I have until the 15th of august to leave. I’ve also been at my parents for the past 5 days trying to recuperate in a stress free environment. But today, I need to go back. I still have duties to perform and school work to get back to. Still, I’ve generalized my anxiety to the entire co op house. Even though I know that there are people there who support me, the returning to the physical structure itself is making me anxious. This isn’t the first time that I have had problems with certain physical locations. After becoming severely depressed and anxious, I have a hard time entering the math building on campus.

I’ve discussed this with my psychologist and it’s something that’s common that I suspect that many people do not realize. That once a certain traumatic incident has happened, the mind responds be seeing everything around it at the time of the trauma as a possible source for fear.

There are ways over this that I’ve found. The biggest one is to approach the area carefully and on your own terms. When I reacclimatized to the math building, I first went when I knew there was no one that was going to be around. Having people around just adds stimuli that I didn’t want to deal with. Also, doing it at night was more calming for me. Even though I sundown, going at night also means that there will be fewer people who might look at what I’m doing as weird. The thing is, that even though I knew that nobody would really care, when I’m anxious, it’s hard to move the thought of people judging me out of my mind.

After being in the math building, I went into the largest room I could find. The small rooms felt claustrophobic, but being in a lecture hall that can handle 300 people felt open and with no one in it, I truly felt completely alone. Then I started doing a little math, just cantor’s diagonal proof, but it felt good. There wasn’t any judgment or anyone looking, it was just me. It was freeing to do this.

Dealing with anxiety, I find that approaching the obstacle on my own terms is the best way. Being pressured into it through time tables or other people will just make it worse. The key in my overcoming anxiety is to control all the variables myself, or as near to as many as possible. Taking time to do some mindfulness exercises to let some of the anxious thoughts pass by and taking command has allowed me to get over my math building fears. The difficulty that I’m facing with the co-op is that I cannot control when people will be there. I cannot control how I can do some of my duties with no one judging me, as it was made pretty explicit that a lot of people are going to constantly judge me while I there. In evicting me through the use of secret meetings, they did more than just kick me out of the house I lived in for two years, they mentally destroyed my ability to live there currently. So, yeah, right now, I’m anxious and want to hide away for the next 3 weeks.

—-

Update: Still at home, my car has a problem with it and I sometimes get panic attacks while driving. Not looking forward to two hours in the car. I’ll definitely have to use back road highways to be able to cope with the drive. It’s a sober reminder that no matter what, anxiety can still rule over whatever you try to do. Hence why medication is so important to getting better, our different minds need a little push to get them into the direction we want them to go.

Killing Time and Good News and Letters

Ok, so I know that I haven’t gotten into much philosophical thought or sciency stuff lately (though the soda cans were really freakin’ cool). But I figure that it might be interesting for people to see what is going on inside a life like mine, as narcissistic as it may seem.

Good news, within 24 hours I found an apartment that is beautiful, the moment my girlfriend and I walked in, it felt like home. So my moods are considerably better. But something more important happened. While there was an overwhelming amount of negativity toward me, there were some positive lights. I received a letter from my girlfriend. I sleep next to her, but she wrote a letter to me anyways. It just explained that in objective terms, both sides last night failed. I failed in living up to some of my duties, and the other side failed in listening with empathy toward my situation. It also helped that when the negativity began to get really heated, she pointed out that people left, that it’s not that I have allies, but that there are people who empathize with me.

In my opinion, that’s everything. Being bipolar has made me feel drastically alone. That’s perhaps why there is such a high suicide rate, that we feel alone in our erratic behavior that we cannot control no matter how hard we try. To have someone say that they still care about you and overlook those failings is one of the most heartwarming and positive things I’ve felt in months. I’m nearly crying because I feel so loved right now. And all it took was a small letter showing that people still cared.

If you know someone who goes through a rough patch, due to mental illness or just a bad place in their life, taking time out to talk to them is great, but letters in my opinion are even better. After people have to inevitably leave, you sink back into your loneliness phase. But having that letter there, having something tangible that you can read and re-read over and over again reinforces that you objectively are not alone. That permanence is often lost in our usual flurry of life, but even something as simple as a text message will be treasured when you’re feeling hopeless. Even from my girlfriend, who I see every day and talk to for hours, to have her give me something like that is like giving me a permanent reminder of our connection.

So while I’m killing time before meeting my psychiatrist, I hope to remind everyone to take some time out, write a letter to someone you love or care about who is going through a hard time. This letter, even if it is brief, will be cherished and loved and will help like nothing else ever will. I know that the letters that I’ve received have lifted my moods out of despair and have me nearly crying from the warmth that I’ve lacked for months. So take some time out of your day, hand write a note, give it to someone who you care about, it’ll help in more ways than you can imagine.

We judge on actions, not the illness

I’m currently sitting in a chair waiting to see if I’m going to be evicted for lacking in duties while I was severely depressed. One phrase kept cropping up “we’re judging you on your actions, not on whether you’re mentally ill.” I’m personally baffled at this kind of statement. You do not have a mental illness if it is truly all in your head, it has physical manifestations as well. That is why it is so destructive to people’s lives, it manifests itself in behavior. To judge the behavior is to judge the manifestation of the mental illness. One cannot separate the two into “bipolar” and “bipolar actions” without ignoring the direct link between the two. To see this see that it is impossible to say to someone that you’re fine with them being bipolar, but you cannot stand the behavior of bipolar people. It’s like saying “it’s ok to be bipolar, but it’s not ok to act bipolary.” The crucial problem is that we cannot help it. If I could stop acting on what goes on inside my head, then I would do it in a flash. But that’s why I take medications, that’s why I do cognitive-behavioral therapy, to try to stop it. However, this is not perfect. And it frustrates the hell out of me to think that people think that it is perfect and solvable in just a matter of months. I don’t know, this is a rant, but I cannot believe that the people I’ve lived with would be so ignorant about this.

Discrimination and Bipolar

I’m writing this while mildly inebriated off of klonopin, a new drug for me since I usually take xanax. The back story will give the reasons why.

I went on vacation this weekend, my moods had been out of sorts, my girlfriend’s mother had her birthday, and I figured that I’d also meet the folks. Being in Cedarburg, I had limited internet access, but saturday night I received a quick message: there was an agenda item about my at my co-op. I was rather irritated since I wasn’t going to be there, and I asked if it would be postponed. It was, until sunday, when I got another email saying that they were going ahead with the meeting. I asked what it was about, no mention, just that it’s about “negativity” in the house. Ok, cool, I’d rather be there if I am mentioned, but if it’s just abstract discussion then I’m relatively ok with it.

I come back on sunday after the meeting has taken place. They’ve decided to try to evict me. It sent me into a tailspin of anxiety and depression that left me at the hospital under suicide watch because of how bad it was. What’s worse, is that they won’t tell me why they’re trying to evict me, just that I am. After reading over the notes, I discovered that most of it is due to me not doing things in two time zones, one occurred in may and the other was june. In may I had a catastrophic reaction to seroquel, I ended up having itunes communicating secret messages to me. Doing things while under that kind of influence tends to be difficult and heavily embarrassing, I had to postpone make up work on my classes by a month. Then during June, I had a surgery on my back and was not able to walk for about 3 weeks all while experiencing what can only be described as a chronic concussion. These were not considered as acceptable excuses, instead as something for me to hide behind under the threat of law suit.

But other issues were brought up, particularly my usual appearance-disappearance behavior that is linked to my mood swings. The only way that I’ve discovered that I can cope with bipolar is to have a lot of me time. So some weeks things would slide, then the next week I would make up for it in some other way. It’s a little ad hoc, but most of my life is ad hoc at this moment.

Still, there is a movement among the other members of the house to kick me out for these behaviors. Their reasoning comes down to the idea that you can have a mental illness, so long as it doesn’t effect your ability to do things. Personally, I don’t know of a mental illness with these traits. I just feel depressed and alone when I hear misunderstandings like that.

Even more worrisome than just the fact that I might be evicted do to a misunderstanding about mental illness is the fact that it is even an option in people’s minds. As an atheist, I find that there’s a lot of discrimination in public areas, but there’s a growing acceptance. And let’s face it, we have pretty good laws protecting eviction due to religious beliefs. Here at my co-op, we have christians and atheists living together in the house, at no time would we evict either one because those beliefs interfere with their lives in the co-op. Especially if it was a religious observance.

Instead, because I have a mental illness, I’m cast (their words and not mine) as untrustworthy and a liar and lazy. Most of these ideas stem from the ad hoc nature of my life where I may say that I can do something given some time, and then a mood swing knocks me on my ass. While it might be frustrating to them to have to wait a day or two longer, it’s equally frustrating to me to be humiliated in being unable to achieve a simple task on time. And it’s frustrating as hell to think that I can be discriminated against and possibly evicted over something that I literally cannot control but am actively attempting to control. Nobody’s perfect, we all have slip ups, and in my case, slip ups will be a common experience in my life, but I can still get the majority of things done, and when manic even more.

However, it’s frustrating to explain this to people, and then have the common line that I’ve heard dozens of times that “maybe you just shouldn’t do x in the first place” be it living with other people, having kids, going to grad school etc… Who gets to have the right to decide what I can and cannot do? What sort of patriarchal sensibility says that others know best about my unique diagnosis and life? The discrimination that is occurring is not just the opposite of empathetic, but it’s a casual assumption that being mentally ill, I cannot make proper decisions for myself. And in order to rid themselves of the discomfort of my minor disappearances, they can legitimize it in thinking “well, this is better for you.” It’s a discrimination that is both condescending and self centered. But they’ll have to face reality, at some point in your life, you’ll have to live with, work with, or know someone with mental illness. We’re not going anywhere. The line of reasoning above is just an excuse to brush it away so that it doesn’t have to be encountered in any substantial form and people can go on with their merry little lives.

As a form of discrimination, mental illness is pervasive as ever and easily excusable. It’s so pervasive that I can live in a house that prides itself on serving every member of the community, except for the crazies. And it adds another fold to what it is like to live with this diagnosis, that people are not only afraid of me, but that I can actually be evicted because of my condition. This is an injustice that I’ve rarely heard from other groups, but I’ve now seen 3 times in the past 6 months. We, the mentally ill, need a stonewall of our own where one day we won’t take it any more and demand our rights. But of course, then we’d just be dismissed as literally the lunatic fringe. Right now, I live in a world of catch-22, and I’ve never experienced hopelessness quite like it.