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Social Distortion
The story of my life. I guess this would be good for people who have been diagnosed mentally ill, and, hopefully help them. I mean, even if they can relate to it it may help.
I have bipolar 2. I have been to hell and back and tend to live on the extreme side of life (well, I did up until a couple of years ago when I knew it was time to calm down). Here is a chronological list of events and their unfolding that you may be able to relate to.
As a child I was always a bit different. Anywhere I was taken when very young I would take all of my clothes off and dance around naked. This continued until I was about seven. I would dance around singing songs. It was, in a way, similar to the scenes from Wish you were here with Emily Lloyd. The crazy thing is she was diagnosed with bipolar and had to be sectioned from the set she was working on.
When I was 7 my dad died and this triggered off some serious problems. I would either cry all the time or think I was indestructable. When I was 8 I decided to run across the road thinking I could beat the car, thinking that even if it hit me I would get up and walk away. I was wrong. 6 months in the hospital with the following..
Fractured skull.
Broken right arm.
Broken right leg below the knee.
Shattered themur (traction for months).
When I was 12 I started to become incredibly manic. I would ride my BMX (and get hurt all the time) so much that I ruptured my muscle wall in my groin and ended up with an enormous hernia. I had it operated on, and was back on my bike two weeks later. Suffice to say it came back and ruptured, almost killing me.
When I was 13 I discovered what depression was. To combat it I took to self medicating (that's what I know it as now). I took large doses of extasy (MDMA) and began to smoke a lot of cannabis as a relaxant. This gave me a break from myself, but when I began to get paranoid on the MDMA I took to smoking massive doses of weed. This made my depression worse, and it got to a stage when I was about 16 that I would go to the grave yard and sleep beside my father's grave. I would cry all the time, sobbing uncontrolably. It was only really my rapid cycles that kept me from commiting suicide, as I would bounce back pretty quickly and wonder what the hell I had been thinking. I had a full on mental breakdown when I was 21 which forced me off of my own medication (the drugs) as if I took one smoke on a joint I would immediately start shaking and crying and break down again.
I have never managed to hold down a job for more than a year at a time. I would either get hyped up and go on a mission to tell the boss what a *** (censored myself) he/she was or just walk out and go and cry somewhere. The longest I held down a job was nearing in on two years, which forced me close to suicide. I just did not want to be there, at all.
I got married in 2001, still undiagnosed. I moved to the USA and things got worse. In the end I forced myself to look for help and I was diagnosed in 2004. I don't think my ex wife quite understood the seriousness of my illness nor did she even want to try and understand it. She left me in 2006, and I never spoke to her again.
This was where I learned about triggers. Losing her and being completely alone 4000 miles from home made me lose my mind. I lost my job where I was living and decided to run and keep running. I went, alone, on a tour of madness. I stopped off in four different states before reaching one 750 miles from where I had been living. I went to live there with an internet friend whom I had never met. I didn't even stop to think that he may not exist, nor that he could be a psycho. Thankfully he wasn't, but the meds had stopped as I had no health plan and I started to become delusional. Again I felt indestructable and would drive my very fast car at full speed everywhere I went. I was slowly losing my mind and I paid the price for it. In July of 2007 I reversed my car at full speed. The turbo kicked in and I hadn't looked in my rear view mirror. I ended up crashing into the car parked in the street and fractured two vertibrae. I tried to continue my life and tried forcing myself to work, but the pain was so bad I could hardly walk.
I then lost my mind some more. I decided that it would be a good idea to dye my hair blue, knowing my employer would fire me. Fire me he did. I was broke, alone, and miles away from home. I had a car that was badly smashed.
Thankfully I had the most amazing friends that I had made during my life back in the place I began my residency in in the USA, and managed to get myself back there. At that stage they all rallied around to help me, getting my car sorted out so I could sell it and afford to come home, and helping me sort out all of my financial problems. By that time though I had totally lost the plot. I was hearing things, seeing things, sitting in my friend's appartment with the curtains drawn and so delusional I thought the whole world wanted to kill me.
I was continually crying, day and night, I wasn't sleeping either.
I managed to make it back in 2008, and it has taken me three years to even feel ready to begin making friends. I leave my house about twice a month and I always have to be with some one when I do. My social anxiety is now so bad I have had to lock myself away. It's not just the anxiety, it's the fact that I am so easily triggered that I have to. It doesn't take much for me to get set off, and which point I can't control myself.
The main problem I am struggling with now is my identity. I don't have one. When I was in the U.S.A I got into music like Rob Zombie and so on, and began to wear black offensive clothing. That was OK, though, as my friends did the same. The problem is that the way I dress myself is not appropriate for the UK any way, let alone some one my age. I can't seem to find any one that shares the same interests as me (both musically and films and so on) because I now totally into what I picked up over the past decade. When I try to make friends I will tell them what I like, but they just sit there blank faced and say "No, never heard of it !".
The problem is that I am happy with myself. I love listening to Rob Zombie and Social distortion and so on, and I don't want to change it. I have had to change my identity many times in the past but I finally feel happy with the one I have. The problem of course is that I tend to stand out a mile.
I only attempted self harming once. I cut my name up my arm. However, I have a very low pain threshold (mainly due to all the injuries I have had) and it didn't really make me feel any better. Mind you, as I explained above I would never feel depressed long enough to want to hurt myself or kill myself. Not until I reached 32 when the depression became so bad that I was planning ways to get rid of myself. Thankfully the medication has made me stable but obviously won't change who I now am.
I found out a year ago that my grandma was bipolar. I never knew this before, but she took a valium overdose in her 50s and had to be sectioned. Firstly my family didn't want to tell me this (it's not the sort of thing you tell a grandchild) and secondly it wasn't called bipolar disorder then, it went under the name manic depression. So I guess it skipped a generation and hit me right in the face.
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